- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Whether it's coming or going, you notice this pollinator's presence.
The European wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum), so named because the female collects or cards "plant hairs" or "plant fuzz" to line her nest, is strikingly beautiful.
The bee is mostly black and yellow. The females, about the size of a worker honey bee, range in body length from 11 to 13 millimeters, while the males are 14 to 17 mm.
The males are very territorial. They put the "terror" in territorial. We see them hovering over the lavender in our yard and then bodyslamming honey bees. This behavior results in very skittish honey bees; no wonder honey bees don't linger on the blossoms long when their cousins show up!
The European wool carder bee, as its name implies, is a non-native. But so, too, are the honey bees, which European colonists brought to America in 1622.
The wool carder bee, according to research entomologist Tom Zavortink of the Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis, was accidentally “introduced into New York state, presumably from Europe, before 1963.” It was not purposefully introduced to pollinate alfalfa, as some reports allege, he said.
Writing in a 2008 edition of the Pan-Pacific Entomologist, Zavortink and fellow entomologist Sandra Shanks, now of Port Townsend, Wash., pointed out that several papers “have documented its spread from neighboring areas in the northeastern United States and southern Canada” and that the species has since crossed the country. It was confirmed in Colorado in 2005, Missouri in 2006, and Maine, Michigan, Maryland and California (Sunnyvale) in 2007, the entomologists wrote.
Records show it was first collected in Davis on July 26, 2007.
The wool carder bee nests in convenient cavities such as old beetle holes and hollow stems, according native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor entomology at UC Davis. Its plant preferences include lamb’s ear (Stachys byzantine, in the mint family Lamiaceae), a perennial grown for its fuzzy, silvery gray-green foliage. It’s also been collected in the figwort/snapdragon family (Scrophulariacae) and the pea and bean family (Fabaceae), according to the Zavortink-Shanks research.
And in our yard, it seems to prefer three plants: lamb's ear, catmint, and lavender.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Most scorpions glow under an ultraviolet light, but now a discovery on Alcatraz Island reveals that a certain species of millipedes will, too.
Forensic entomologist Robert Kimsey of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, who does fly research on Alcatraz, said that bait laced with a non-toxic fluorescent dye to estimate the rat population in February yielded the expected result: the glow of rat urine and feces.
But something else was glowing nearby: millipedes.
Had they consumed some of the rat bait?
No. An experiment at the Bohart Museum of Entomology on the UC Davis campus showed that these millipedes (Xystocheir dissecta (Wood) glow under black lights, just like scorpions.
Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum and a professor of entomology at UC Davis, said the species is a relatively abundant species in the Bay Area. “This particular species of millipedes glowed all along, but nobody was paying any attention to it,” she said.
She suspects that the millipedes on Alcatraz Island originated from soil transported over from the nearby Angel Island when “The Rock” was just that—rock with little or no soil.
Meanwhile, if you attend the Bohart Museum's open house from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, June 3 at 1124 Academic Surge, California Drive, you'll see scorpions and millipedes glowing.
And there's something else to draw you in: a special live display of the California dogface butterfly by naturalist/photographer Greg Kareofelas of Davis. If all goes as planned, an adult will emerge from its chrysalis. If this doesn't happen (well, you can't tell a buttterfly when to emerge!) you can watch the life cycle on his PowerPoint presentation, to run continuously throughout the open house.
And, you can ask Kareofelas all about the California dogface butterfly (Zerene eurydice), which, by the way, is close to royalty--it's California's designated state insect.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
But this Sunday, June 3, something even more special "may" occur.
That's "may" because a California dogface butterfly "may" emerge from its chrysalis during the Bohart open house, set from 1 to 4 p.m. in 1124 Academic Surge on California Drive.
Naturalist-photographer Greg Kareofelas of Davis, a volunteer at the Bohart, will be showcasing some live California dogface butterflies--and a chrysalis.
Kareofelas is rearing several dogface butterflies (Zerene eurydice). The first adult emerged from its chrysalis on May 28. He’s hoping one will emerge during the open house.
Even if it doesn't, Kareofelas will be presenting a slide show of the butterfly's life cycle. (By the way, Sunday marks the last Bohart open house of the 2011-2012 academic year, and yes, it's free and open to the public.)
Several years ago Kareofelas and entomology doctoral candidate Fran Keller teamed to create a California dogface butterfly poster, which is available for sale in the museum's gift shop.
What about the state insect? What do we know about it?
The high-flying butterfly, found only in California, is rarely seen in the wild. Its main host plant is False indigo (Amorpha californica), a riparian shrub that grows among poison oak and willows and along stream banks, often in steep and isolated canyons. The male has markings on its wings resembling a silhouette of a dog's head. The female is usually solid yellow with a black spot on each upper wing.
The California State Legislature designated the California dogface butterfly as the state insect in 1972. An entomology society in Southern California first proposed this butterfly as the state insect in 1929, but nothing came of it until 1972 when a fourth grade class in Fresno petitioned their state representative, said Tabatha Yang, the Bohart Museum's education and outreach coordinator.
The California dogface butterfly display will be one of the two main attractions at the Bohart's open house, which is themed “Bug Light, Bug Bright, First Bug I See Tonight!” The other key attractions will be bugs that glow under ultraviolet light, according to museum director Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis.
Think scorpions. And don't forget that species of millipede found on Alcatraz Island. They glow, too!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
If you've ever been to Angel Island or Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay, you may have seen them.
Bumble bees.
And sometimes if you're fishing in the Bay, a bumble bee may land on your boat.
That was the case Monday, May 28 when the sportsfishing charter boat, The Morning Star, left its berth at Loch Lomond Marina, San Rafael, and headed out to the Bay to search for what skipper Gordon Hough calls "meals on reels."
The Morning Star encountered the bumble bee about two miles north of Angel Island, near the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.
Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, later identified it from the photo below as a female Bombus vosnesenskii.
Nobody was catching any halibut or stripers at the time, so some of the anglers caught an image of the yellow-faced bumble bee.
"I thought it was remarkable to see a bee flying around in the middle of nowhere," said Hough.
"She was probaby just too lazy to fly the distance and decided to hitch a ride," quipped Thorp. "Wonder if she does a daily commute to find a better patch of flowers."
Thorp says that bumble bees are "larger, stronger fliers than honey bees and can potentially fly for several miles."
"They have occasionally been found on boats off shore, but like honey bees, they tend not to forage across wide strips of water," Thorp says.
UC Davis forensic entomologist Robert Kimsey, who does fly research on Alcatraz, has seen bumble bees on Alcatraz, too. No honey bees, but bumble bees.
As for Hough, he says he has no plans to offer bumble bee charters.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Ever seen honey bees engaging in washboarding?
It's a behavior so named because they look as if they're scrubbing clothes on a washboard or scrubbing their home.
It occurs near the entrance of the hive and only with worker bees. They go back and forth, back and forth, a kind of rocking movement. No one knows why they do it. It's one of those unexplained behaviors they've probably been doing for millions of years.
Bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey of the University of California, Davis and Washington State University, has witnessed washboarding scores of times. Last week the unusual behavior occurred on two of her hives at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis. She hypothesizes that these bees are in the "unemployment line." It's a time when foraging isn't so good, so these bees are "sweeping the porch" for something to do, she speculates.
Emeritus professor Norman Gary of UC Davis Department of Entomology writes about it in his chapter, Activities and Behavior of Honey Bees, in the Dadant publication The Hive and the Honey Bee.
"They stand on the second and third pairs of legs and face the entrance. Their heads are bent down and the front legs are also bent," wrote Gary, who has kept bees for more than six decades. "They make 'rocking' or 'washboard' movements, thrusting their bodies forward and backward. At the same time they scrape the surface of the hive with their mandibles with a rapid shearing movement, sliding over the surface as if cleaning it."
They pick up some material and then clean their mandibles.
Gary thinks that "these rocking movements probably serve as a cleaning process by which the bees scrape and polish the surface of the hive."
Like most people, professor/biologist/bee researcher James Nieh of UC San Diego has never seen this behavior. Nieh, who recently presented at seminar at UC Davis, later commented "It is an interesting behavior that would be particularly fascinating to observe in natural colonies in trees. It does seem to involve some cleaning behavior, although it is possible that bees are depositing some olfactory compound while they are rubbing the surface with their mandibles. We are currently conducting research in my lab on the effects of bee mandibular gland secretions on foraging orientation behavior. A new set of experiments will involve examining the effect of mandibular gland secretions on bee behaviors at the nest. I will definitely consider looking at how this potential pheromone affects washboarding."
We managed to capture the behavior with our Iphone and posted it on YouTube.
It's interesting that of the some 25 research hives at the Laidlaw facility, occupants of two of Cobey's hives exhibited washboarding last week.
So, what are washboarding bees doing? Cleaning their home where pathogenic organisms might congregate, per a theory by Katie Bohrer and Jeffrey Pettis of the USDA-ARS Bee Research Lab?
Or are they just creating "busy work"--"sweeping the porch" for something to do?
It would be interesting to find out!
