Bee swarm at UC Davis. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology was quoted in a news story published today about a bee swarm on a Stockton ballfield.

"It came from over the center-field wall during the top of the fourth inning, a dark cloud headed straight for home plate," wrote Stockton Record staff writer Alex Breitler. "Bees. Perhaps 20,000 of them."

Breitler related that "players dived into the dirt or spring for the dugout, while the public address announcer asked the crowd to stay calm."

These weren't Africanized bees. They were European honey bees. But the buzzing apparently scared a lot of people.

Mussen explained to the news reporter why swarms occur: a honey bee colony grows so large that the queen takes off with half of the bees, leaving her hive to a daughter queen.

"When the bees are swarming," Mussen told the reporter, "it's about the craziest thing you ever saw. There's this big mass of bees moving back and forth, up and down, forward and backward."

When bees swarm, they're following their leaders or scouts, who are seeking a new home for the colony. (Read Thomas Seeley's The Honeybee Democracy.)

Often bee swarms move along in a couple of hours or a couple of days.

The bee swarm occurred on Sunday.

What happened next probably disgusted a lot of people, especially beekeepers and others who are trying to help the bees.

"The bees were still there the next morning," Breiter related. "With another game in a matter of hours, the team took action Monday."

Someone called an exterminator who "zapped them" dead.

All 20,000 of them. No more pollination services or honey producers for these bees.

As an aside, if you encounter a bee swarm, you can contact your local beekeeping association to collect the swarm. The UC Davis Department of Entomology maintains a list of California beekeeping groups and state beekeeping associations on its Bee Biology Program's website. Indeed, we in the UC Davis Department of Entomology frequently field calls about bee swarms. Three came in over the last couple of days. Each time a beekeeper came out and gratefully collected them.

Almost all of the calls we receive are prefaced with "I know that the bee population is declining and I don't want them killed. Do you know of someone who could come out and get them?"

Unfortunately, some call a exterminator. Me thinks that a beekeeper could arrive as quickly as an exterminator.

Bryony Bonning

That's why we're looking forward to hearing Bryony Bonning speak on "Novel Toxin Delivery Strategies for Management of Pestiferous Aphids" at the next UC Davis Department of Entomology seminar, scheduled from 12:10 to 1 p.m., Wednesday, April 18 in 122 Briggs Hall.

Aphids, Bonning says,  transmit more than 275 plant viruses "that result in considerable economic loss within the agricultural sector."

Now that's a lot of plant viruses!

A professor with the Iowa State University's Department of Entomology, Bonning is closely linked to UC Davis. She's a former postdoctoral research associate in the Bruce Hammock lab, Department of Entomology. Hammock, a distinguished professor of entomology, worked with her from 1990 to 1994. Her specialty: genetic engineering and optimization of baculovirus insecticides.

Bonning returns here Wednesday with lots of credentials. She's an associate editor for the Journal of Invertebrate Pathology; a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); a member of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, Baculovirus Study Group; and a member of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, Dicistrovirus/Iflavirus Study Group.

Bonning received her bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Durham, UK in 1985, and her doctorate in applied entomology from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London, UK in 1989.

In her abstract for Wednesday's talk, Bonning explains: "Viruses in the Luteoviridae are obligately transmitted by aphids in a persistent manner that requires virion accumulation in the aphid hemocoel.  To enter the hemocoel, the virion must bind and traverse the aphid gut epithelium. The molecular mechanisms involved in this process are poorly understood. By screening a phage display library, we identified a peptide that binds to the gut epithelium of the pea aphid Acyrthosiphon pisum  (Harris) and impedes the update of Pea enation mosaic virus from the pea aphid gut into the hemocoel.   In this talk, the development of two novel aphid management technologies based on knowledge of pea aphid – Pea enation mosaic virus molecular interactions will be described. These technologies provide enhanced delivery of both gut active and neurotoxic peptides."

"I can hardly wait for Bryony Bonning to visit us and present a seminar," Hammock said. "She is one of our most productive alumni in continuing her work on insect developmental biology and green pesticides based on insect viruses and expanded this dramatically into exciting new areas.  She is advancing fundamental virology while applying this knowledge in production agriculture in both insect control and in blocking transmission of plant diseases by insects.  She clearly is the leader in insect control with recombinant viruses."

Her April 18th seminar promises to zero in on those dratted pea aphids. The more we know about them, the better we can control them.

And the good news is that many of the UC Davis Department of Entomology's seminars will be videotaped and later posted on UCTV.

Two bees seem confused. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

It was the first swarm of the season at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, University of California, Davis.

The bees swirled, darkening the sky, and then swarmed from one of bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey's hives around 2 p.m. It was a sight to "bee-hold." At the onset, the bees looked quite confused, as if not knowing what to do. (Well, after all, they'd never done this before!) Most joined the queen in a cluster on a nearby tree branch. A few stragglers touched down on leaves.

Still others headed buzzed over to the empty hive that Cobey had strategically placed below the swarm. 

A few hours later, Cobey hived the swarm. Voila!

The entire scenario reminded us what biologist Thomas Seeley of Cornell University said when he addressed two separate UC Davis crowds on Jan. 19 and Jan. 20.

Seeley, a professor in Cornell's Department of Neurobiology and Behavior (he teaches courses on animal behavior and researches the functional organization of honey bee colonies), outlined what bees do when they swarm.

They do it, he said, through "swarm intelligence, the solving of a cognitive problem by two or more individuals who independently collect information and process it through social interactions."

"With the right organization, a group can overcome the cognitive limitations of its members and achieve a high collective IQ.   To understand how to endow groups with swarm intelligence, it is useful to examine natural systems that have evolved this ability.   An excellent example is a swarm of honey bees solving the life-or-death problem of finding a new home.   A honey bee swarm accomplishes this through a process that includes collective fact-finding, open sharing of information, vigorous debating, and fair voting by the hundreds of bees in a swarm that function as nest-site scouts.”

In his informative book, The Honeybee Democracy, Seeley writes:  "Beekeepers have long observed, and lamented, the tendency of their hives to swarm in the late spring and early summer. When this happens, the majority of a colony's members--a crowd of some 10,000 worker bees--flies off with the old queen to produce a daughter colony, while the rest stays at home and rears a new queen to perpetuate the parental colony. The migrating bees settle on a tree branch in a beardlike cluster and then hang there together for several hours or a few days. During this time, these homeless insects will do something truly amazing; they will hold a democratic debate to choose their new home."

What they do IS truly amazing. We watched the swirl of bees cluster on a tree branch where they paused, as if waiting for "directions." (Or a Google map?)

We didn't see what Seeley calls "the collective-decision making of the swarm" and "the democratic debate" but indeed that happened, as it's been happening for millions of years.  

In the end, the Laidlaw bees all relocated to their new home.

Home, sweet home.

They're there.

If you walk slowly into your garden or backyard, and observe your surroundings, you'll find them. A jumping spider perched on a rose leaf. A soldier beetle climbing out of a tulip. A syrphid fly, aka flower fly or hover fly, foraging on a poppy blossom.

The insects (and spiders!) are back. The springlike temperatures, accompanied by bursts of rain, mean that these tiny little critters are everywhere. 

If you pop a macro lens on your single-lens reflex camera, or use the macro setting on your point-and-shoot camera, you'll get them. There's even a set of lenses (macro, wide-angle and telephoto) that magnetically attach to your I-phone camera.

Travelers say it's fun and educational to go to Africa on safari, but you can also go on a Bug Safari in your backyard. It won't cost nearly as much, you don't have to make reservations, you don't have to hire a tour guide, and you don't have to worry about a water buffalo charging you. 

Or your credit card company charging you.