- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
What's that caterpillar?
This little fellow (or gal) was munching--quite contentedly, thank you--on the leaves of an aspen tree.
The homeowner didn't take too kindly to the critter defoliating his prized tree, newly purchased in Oregon and newly planted in Vacaville, Calif., so he asked us what it was.
Butterfly expert Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, who maintains Art's Butterfly World website, identified it in a second.
"Smerinthus cerisyi, an exceedingly beautiful sphingid (nocturnal) with eyespots," he said. "Pupates in the ground and will emerge next April or May. Not native in Vacaville but fairly common in upland Napa, Sonoma and Lake counties and in the Sierra, Siskiyous, etc."
Shapiro surmised that the "eggs could have come in from Oregon."
So if you, too, have an aspen in your yard and are wondering what these little critters are, they will grow into a beautiful "One-Eyed Sphinx Moth" or "Cerisy's Sphinx"--if you let them.
"I encourage someone to rear them out rather than kill them," Shapiro says. "They actually won't harm the tree significantly. They'll also eat cottonwood and non-woolly willow foliage (not sandbar willow)."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's not often you see a monarch butterfly and a digger bee in the same photo.
Such was the case on a recent visit to a lantana patch at a west Vacaville home.
The monarch butterfly touched down on a blossom and was beginning to nectar when along comes a digger bee, a male Anthophora urbana (as identified by native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at the Universit of California, Davis.)
"Maybe it was planing on dive bombing the big intruder from his territory," Thorp said. "However, these males are not known to be especially territorial. Maybe he's just checking out the competition for nectar."
This is the solitary, ground-nesting bee that Leslie Saul-Gershenz, graduate student in the Neal Williams lab at UC Davis, is researching. She's published research on a species of digger bee, Habropoda pallida, a solitary ground-nesting bee, and its nest parasite, a blister beetle, Meloe franciscanus, found in the Mojave Desert ecosystem.
Now she's also including Anthophora.
“Our preliminary data show that the blister beetle exploits four other native California bees including important pollinators in the genus Habropoda and Anthophora," she recently told us.
Historically, the blister beetle, Meloe franciscanus, was known to be a nest parasite of Anthophora edwardsii, distributed throughout California.
See her amazing photo of the parasitic larvae of the blister beetle on the digger bee, Habropoda pallida, on the UC Davis Entomology website.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The folks at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis,call them "jungle gems."
And "gems" they are.
They're New World orchid bees (Euglossine bees), which museum director Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis, describes as "the most beautiful bees in the world."
They were recently featured at a Bohart Museum open house.
A sign next to them read: "They pollinate orchids. They also probably have the best memory of any insect. The males memorize the location of all the orchid plants in their patch of forest and visit them periodically during the day."
The "jungle gems" are just a few of the treasures that visitors can see at the Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of Academic Surge. The building is on Crocker Avenue (formerly California Avenue). The nearest intersection is LaRue Road.
The Bohart houses a global collection of more than seven million insect specimens and is the seventh largest insect collection in North America. It is also the home of the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. Noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007) founded the museum in 1946.
The Bohart is open to the public from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday. It is closed to the public on Fridays and on major holidays. Admission is free.
To allow more visitors to attend, the museum holds a weekend open house once a month. The next weekend open house is set from 1 to 4 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 27. The theme, in keeping with Halloween, is "Insects of Death."
Stay tuned on what's planned!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Honey bees on blanket flowers (Gaillardia).
Honey bees on Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia).
The Girls of Autumn....not unlike The Boys of Summer...
Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, emphasizes that backyard gardeners should plant bee friendly flowers for all the seasons.
'Limited plantings of backyard, or even acres, of flowers will greatly improve the possibility of enhancing the native bee population in the area," Mussen says. "However, each honey bee colony requires an acre equivalent of forage on a daily basis, all during its active season. This seems to be pretty hard to accomplish, but honey bees will fly up to four miles from the hive in any compass direction to get food. That is an area of 50 square miles in which to find that acre equivalent."
G. H. Vansell, author of the University of California's treasured 1941 bulletin, "Nectar and Pollen Plants of California," writes that "six of the most important sources of nectar in California are the sages, alfalfa, orange, wild buckwheats, star thistle and Christmas berry; of these, the sages, wild buckwheats and Christmas berry are native." (Read this book online in openlibrary.org.)
Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, has singled out some of the best native plants for bees. The information, gleaned his own experience and from Vansell's list, appears on the website of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis.
And if you want to look up individual plants, Thorp urges you to access Calflora (UC Berkeley).
Good advice and a good way to help the bees!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
We're accustomed to seeing a solitary monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) flitting around a garden.
But millions of them?
It was interesting to read the National Public Radio piece (Oct. 4) on Flight: A Few Million Little Creatures That Could.
The feature news story traces how a "young boy in Canada wondered where butterflies go in the winter--and spend 40 years trying to answer that question."
"In 1973, Dr. Fred Urquhart--all grown up by then--placed an ad in a newspaper in Mexico looking for volunteers to tag and observe butterflies and find their destination."
A woman and her husband answered the ad, and in the course of two years, found "hundreds of millions of butterflies."
Monarch sanctuaries!
If you access the NPR website, you'll see clips of a documentary made by Mike Slee. It's called the "Flight of the Butterflies," which NPR describes as a "3-D IMAX film about the migration of the monarchs to sanctuaries."
"What you see, you can't imagine nature ever being like this," Slee tells NPR. "Trees that are draped — that are made, almost, of butterflies. It's got a surreal, supernatural feeling to it. It sends a sort of tingle up your spine when you see it in 3-D. And then they wake up and they all begin to fly."
NPR goes on to say that "the migration of the monarch butterfly is a staggering natural phenomenon. It takes two or three generations for the creatures to make their way north to Canada — but then one 'supergeneration' makes the 2,000-mile trip back to Mexico for the winter."
At UC Davis, emeritis professor Hugh Dingle is a noted authority on the migration of animals. He's been featured in National Geographic and other magazines. The good news is that he's writing the second edition of his popular textbook, Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (Oxford University Press).
Dingle, who is headquartered in the Sharon Lawler lab in the UC Davis Department of Entomology, was featured in the National Geographic magazine's cover story, "Mysteries of Great Migrations."
He was quoted in a LiveScience news story on “Why Do Animals Migrate?”
Excellent information!
Frankly, we don't see as many monarchs as we'd like to. Seeing even one monarch "sends a tingle up the spine."
Plant and insect enthusiast Gary Zamzow of Davis--and an excellent photographer--recently planted some milkweed (the monarch's host plant) in the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a pollinator friendly garden located next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, UC Davis.
Hopefully, the milkweeds will attract many of those mighty monarchs next year and send lots of "tingles up the spine."