Okay, I’ll admit it.

I have a soft spot for honey bees.

Today I fished out some thoroughly drenched honey bees from our swimming pool.

Indeed, the pool looked like an Olympic meet for Apis mellifera.

It appears that while the bees were foraging on the nearby cherry laurel blossoms, they tumbled into the pool. That's when I saw them--struggling--and netted them.

I could say “They looked like drowned rats,” but I’m not and they didn't. They looked like very much like drowned honey bees.

I took a plastic spoon, dipped it into a jar of starthistle honey and offered it to them. They sipped it, gathered a quick burst of energy, and off they buzzed. 

I suspect they returned to their hives. Maybe tomorrow they'll be back foraging in the  cherry laurels, but hopefully, they won't be back in the pool, and will warn their sisters of the danger through head butts.

Saving a few bees, one bee at a time, is a little like saving starfish on the beach. Author Loren Eiseley inspired others with this story:

“While wandering a deserted beach at dawn, stagnant in my work, I saw a man in the distance bending and throwing as he walked the endless stretch toward me. As he came near, I could see that he was throwing starfish, abandoned on the sand by the tide, back into the sea. When he was close enough I asked him why he was working so hard at this strange task. He said that the sun would dry the starfish and they would die. I said to him that I thought he was foolish. there were thousands of starfish on miles and miles of beach. One man alone could never make a difference. He smiled as he picked up the next starfish. Hurling it far into the sea he said, 'It makes a difference for this one.' I abandoned my writing and spent the morning throwing starfish.” 
― Loren Eiseley

Today the honey bees were starfish. 

Eric Mussen

"How do I become a beekeeper?" he asked.

A very good question, and one that the UC Davis Department of Entomology answers a lot. Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen who's been with the department since 1976, is keen on helping.

"My advice to anyone who wishes to start keeping honey bees," Mussen says, "is to try to do the following, in order, if possible." 

1. Find and read some books on how-to-do-it beekeeping.  They can be the less expensive paperbacks, like “Beekeeping for Dummies.”
2. Try to find a beginning beekeeping course being taught this spring in your area.  Many of the local clubs conduct such classes.  (See this page)
   
3. Try to become a member of a local beekeeping club.  The members can help you get started and tell you what to watch out for in the neighborhood.  If you cannot find a nearby club, see if you can find a nearby beekeeper to give you some tips.  Some beekeepers list their services in the phone book Yellow Pages, under beekeeper or beekeeping.

But what about that reconditioned bee hive? 

"It would be best to determine why the previous owner is no longer keeping bees," Mussen says. "If the colony died off due to American foulbrood (AFB) disease, the infectious spores will still be in the equipment.  Putting new bees on the combs will simply result in loss of the new colony to disease.  This is why I suggest that you become acquainted with an experienced beekeeper.  He or she will be able to examine your used equipment to determine if it contains 'scales' of an old AFB infection.  You can look up this information on the web or in textbooks, but until you have seen the scales, personally, it is hard to detect them."

How do you obtain bees for your hive? There are several ways.

"You can obtain bees by collecting swarms, extracting colonies from current hives, or by doing what most beginning beekeepers do, purchasing 'packages.'  A package is a wire screen box containing either two or three pounds of bulk bees and a mated queen confined in her own separate cage.  You take four frames out of your bee box, remove the lath holding the food can in the package, take out the queen cage and put it in your shirt pocket, dump and shake the bulk bees into the hive, spread the clump of bees out with your hive tool, and replace the four frames."

"Take the queen cage out of your pocket and, using a toothpick or wooden match stick, push a small hole through the queen candy at one end of the queen cage (you may need to remove a cork from the candy end, but I doubt it – DON’T IMPALE THE QUEEN!).  Then, position the queen cage between two combs such that the screen is available to the bees at all times.  Squeeze the two combs together to hold the queen cage in that appropriate position and close up the hive.  Within three days, the bees should have chewed out the candy and liberated the queen.  She will begin laying in another day or two.  You can check for eggs a week after you installed the package."

"If all of this sound like gibberish and lingo to you, it is time to start a heavy dose of reading on bees and beekeeping," Mussen suggests.

Excellent advice! It's especially important when you're poking around with a matchstick not to "impale the queen!" 

For more information on beekeeping, read his Bee Briefs on his website (he has one brief  titled "Beginning Beekeeping") and his newsletter, from the UC Apiaries. 

Praying mantis figured in some of the questions. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

They know what a "land lobster" is. They know diseases caused by trypanosomes. They can name the six orders of arthropods represented in the circus troupe from the movie, "A Bug's Life." 

The UC Davis Department of Entomology's Linnaean Team, comprised of four graduate students, applied their knowledge of entomological facts to win the championship at  the Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America (ESA) competition, held recently in Portland, Ore.

Matan Shelomi, Kelly Hamby, Kelly Liebman, and Jenny Carlson now will head to the  Linnaean Games at the international organization’s 60th annual meeting, set for Nov. 11-14 in Knoxville, Tenn.  The ESA’s Linnaean Games are college bowl-style games based on entomological facts and insect trivia. Team members respond to the moderator's questions by buzzing in with the answers. (See video of last year's winners at the national level.)

The prize at the regionals was $500 to defray costs to the national event.   Extension entomology specialist Larry Godfrey of the Department of Entomology faculty serves as the team’s advisor.

Six teams—UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, University of Idaho, and two teams for Washington State—competed in the lively six-round , three-hour event.  In the first round, UC Davis was pitted against one of the WSU teams. “The questions were very difficult compared to the two rounds that preceded us,” Shelomi said. “We tied 30/30, but we won the tiebreaker question. It was a picture question showing a map of Ball's Pyramid, Lord Howe Island, New Zealand, taken from a recent National Public Radio (NPR) article on an insect recently rediscovered there after having been thought to be extinct.”

The answer: Lord Howe Island Phasmid, Dryococelus australis, also known as a land lobster.

Shelomi, the team’s phasmid expert, said he was “was very happy to see that picture and knew the answer before they asked the question. After that, we played the University of Idaho and won, then we had a showdown with UC Berkeley for the top two positions.” Both will represent the Pacific Branch in Knoxville.

It was a long night, the UC Davis team agreed. The UC Davis team played three out of the total of six games.

Hamby served as the agricultural entomology and integrated pest management (IPM) expert on the team; Liebman and Carlson, medical entomology; and Shelomi,  insect physiology.  This was the first-ever Linnaean Games competition for Hamby and Liebman.

All four are studying for their doctorates.  Hamby’s major professor is IPM specialist Frank Zalom; Liebman’s major professor is medical entomologist Tom Scott (she receives funds from a grant awarded to medical entomologist Greg Lanzaro, School of Veterinary Medicine); Shelomi’s major professor is Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology; and Jenny Carlson’s major professors are medical entomologists Anthony “Anton” Cornel and Gregory Lanzaro.

Some other questions asked:

Name four of the six orders of arthropods represented in the circus troupe from the movie "A Bug's Life." (Answers: Lepidoptera, Mantodea, Coleoptera, Phasmatodea, Isopoda, Aranaea.)

What are the two diseases caused by trypanosomes and vectored by insects, and where do they occur? (Answers: Chagas in South America, African Sleeping Sickness in sub-Saharan Africa.)

This is the second consecutive year that a UC Davis team has won the Pacific Branch competition. Each individual branch of the ESA may send its winning team and runner-up to compete in the internationals. Gold medals are awarded to the winning team, and silver medals to the runner-up.  In addition, each of the two winning teams receives a plaque for its department.

The Pacific Branch of the ESA includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, Wyoming; U.S. territories of  American Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia, Guam, Johnston Atoll, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, Midway Islands, and Wake Island; and parts of Canada and Mexico.

Matan Shelomi with a walking stick. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

That was basically the question that UC Davis entomologist/doctoral candidate Matan Shelomi answered on Quora. 

Shelomi answered it so well that he tied for a first-place Shorty Award, the social media-equivalent of an Oscar. The Shorties are given annually to the best producers of short content on social media, as determined by popular vote. The question, posted on Quora, the popular question-and-answer website which engages worldwide users, drew scores of answers, but Shelomi's answer went viral and resulted in an invitation to the fourth annual star-studded Shorty Awards ceremony on March 26 in Times Square, New York City.

And nobody was more surprised than Matan Shelomi.

“I’ve been posting on Quora for a few months now after my sophomore roommate from Harvard, who works there, invited me to it. Not to question a website with employees from Harvard, I signed up. I occasionally go on there and post answers to entomology questions, especially if I get an e-invite to answer a specific question. I’ve answered more than 100 questions so far.”

"I saw this one question on ‘If you injure a bug, should you kill it’ on Nov 30, 2011 and was dissatisfied with the answers, which mostly answered from a religious or philosophical standpoint. I looked up insect pain reception briefly and answered it. I had no idea my response would be so popular! Apparently it's a question a lot of people had. It was popularized on Gawker as one of the 'most demented questions on Quora.' "

“They liked my answer, though. That was surprising enough, and later I got an email out of the blue saying I had been nominated for a Shorty, 'The Oscars of Twitter.' "

His answer:

“Looks like the philosophers and theists have made their cases. As far as entomologists are concerned, insects do not have pain receptors the way vertebrates do. They don't feel ‘pain,’ but may feel irritation and probably can sense if they are damaged. Even so, they certainly cannot suffer because they don't have emotions. If you heavily injure an insect, it will most likely die soon: either immediately because it will be unable to escape a predator, or slowly from infection or starvation. Ultimately this crippling will be more of an inconvenience to the insect than a tortuous existence, so it has no ‘misery’ to be put out of but also no real purpose anymore. If it can't breed anymore, it has no reason to live.

“In other words, I have not answered your question because, as far as the science is concerned, neither the insect nor the world will really care either way. Personally, though, I'd avoid doing more damage than you've already done. 1) Maybe the insect will recover, depending on how damaged it is. 2) Some faiths do forbid taking animal lives, so why go out of your way to kill? 3) You'll stain your shoe.”

Shelomi's answer drew widespread praise on Quora, including:

--“This, by far, is the funniest answer I have read on Quora. Not only the funniest answer, but also the funniest show of authority on a subject. You have to love the casualness of it and the mockery aspect. Funny and yet not frivolous. Well done. 10/10. I will read it again now.”

 --“Great answer, the shoe comment is what really sold it.”

Shelomi's response was subsequently nominated for “best answer on Quora," a new category of the Shorties. Another commitment prevented him from being at the Times Square award ceremony, held March 26, but he posted his "equally short" video acceptance speech. He earlier recorded it at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis, where he studies insect physiology.

As it turned out, Shelomi shared the first-place award in the Quora category with former police officer Justin Freeman, now an evangelical pastor in Mountain Grove, Mo., who answered “What’s the best way to escape the police in a high-speed car chase?”

If you have a question, you, too, can post it on Quora. And if it's an entomological question, you just might get a creative answer from Matan Shelomi.