- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
A field of green ribboned in yellow.
Anyone who drives down Pedrick Road in Dixon, Calif., and sees the spectacular sunflower fields can't help but smile.
Yellow sunflowers do that to you. They make you smile.
A native of the Americas and the state flower of Kansas, the sunflower (Helianthus annuus) brightens gardens and run-down neighborhoods, but when it's planted in rows and each head turns toward the sun, it's like a thousand suns and a thousand smiles.
Add honey bees and native bees, and nature's canvas is complete.
If you visit a sunflower field early in the morning, you might see male long-horn bees, genus Melissodes, sleeping in aggregations, on the heads.
As native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, points out: "Males of native solitary bees do not have nests to return to at night as the females do. So they fend for themselves in a variety of different ways such as these sleeping aggregations, or within tubular flowers that close up each day, like squash bee males do in squash flowers."
That's bee heaven.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's a perfect example of "the bad, the ugly and the good."
In that order. Not "the good, the bad and the ugly."
The yellow starthistle (Centaurea solstitialis) is the kind of obnoxious weed you wish would go away forever. It's highly invasive, thorny as a pincushion jammed with needles, and poisons horses.
It's also a non-native. From Eurasia, it's been in the Americas for about 161 years. Today it infests more than 14 million acres in California alone.
But this stickery plant makes fantastic honey. If you've ever tasted starthistle honey, you probably won't want another variety.
Large-scale migratory beekeeper John Miller of Gackle, N.D., who trucks his bees all over the country, including California, likes honey. Which honey does he like the best? Starthistle. He describes starthistle honey as like "a wall of sunshine."
You can read about him and his love of honey in Hannah Nordhaus' newly published book, The Beekeepers' Lament: How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America.
"The best honey plants aren't always the best plants for other human purposes," Nordhaus writes. She quotes Miller as saying that the starthistle is a "terrible, noxious, invasive nasty weed."
He's right.
"It is so hated by farmers that in California, state agriculture officials have released a wasp that lays eggs that kill the bloom, so starthistle honey guys just don't get the production they used to," Nordhaus points out.
"Botanists," she adds, "suspect that the weed hitchhiked to the New World with alfalfa seeds from Spain, and it can now be found all over the West..."
At the annual UC Davis Picnic Day, starthistle honey is a favorite of honey samplers. Every year Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology sets up a table in the Briggs Hall courtyard and invites folks to sample about six varieties of honey.
"Omigosh this is good!" they exclaim after tasting starthistle honey.
It's good, but the plant it came from is...totally undesirable.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
First you give them roots, then you give them wings.
That's what's happening in our bee condo, a wooden block (nest) with drilled holes for leafcutting bees (Megachile).
They flew in, laid their eggs, provisioned the nests with pollen and leaf fragments, and capped the holes.
We had 11 tenants. Now there's a hole in one.
Success! A leafcutting bee emerged. Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, says that "Some leafcutting bees, especially the introduced ones like the alfalfa leafcutting bee, have more than one generation per year. Bees of the second and third generation may clean out or partly clean out old nest holes like this and construct a new nest inside. Sometimes you can find new leaf material inside the old cocoon of the previous nest builder. Thus, the tunnels get smaller in diameter with succeeding generations. Kind of like the build up of old cocoons in honey bee comb and resulting smaller inner diameter of the brood cells in old dark comb."
It's all rather exciting being a "beekeeper." We've never had a hole in one--'til now.
If you, too, want to keep native bees, Thorp has compiled a list of where you can buy homes for them or where you can learn how to build your own. The list is on the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research facility website.
You can also buy them at beekeeping supply stores.
Now that we have a hole in one, 10 tenants to go...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The places to "bee" for beekeepers in September and November are the Big Island of Hawaii and the not-so-little-city of Rohnert Park, Calif.
The Western Apicultural Society, founded by UC Davis scientists in 1978, has scheduled its annual conference for Sept. 12-15 at the Hapuna Beach Prince Hotel, Big Island, north of Kona.
The California State Beekeepers' Association, organized in 1889, will gather Nov. 15-17 for its 2011 convention at Sonoma/Wine Country Doubletree Inn at Rohnert Park.
Bee health, and the latest updates on colony collapse disorder (CCD), will be among the topics at each conference.
Among the UC Davis experts participating at both conferences will be Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen, member of the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty since 1976 and one of the founders of the Western Apicultural Society.
It's called "WAS" for short, but there's nothing past tense about it.
Meanwhile, you can get up-to-date bee news by reading Mussen's from the UC apiaries newsletters and Bee Briefs, both located on the UC Davis Department of Entomology website and downloadable for free.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Up close and personal, those blue damselflies (suborder Zygoptera, order Odonata) look prehistoric.
Fact is, they were here before the dinosaurs.
These needlelike insects add an iridescent presence as they fly awkwardy over our fish pond, catching prey. In the early morning, they land in our nectarine tree. They're not there to pick nectarines. They're warming their flight muscles.
Their brilliant colors draw us to them. But their huge compound eyes quickly notice us and off they go.
Awkwardly.