Please, please, forget to eat our forget-me-nots! 

But it's not going to happen.

So here we are in our Vacaville pollinator garden, looking at the Chinese forget-me-nots. We see honey bees, leafcutter bees, syrphid flies, lady beetles, cabbage white butterflies,  and other critters foraging. It's National Pollinator Week. 

And then we see a pinkish caterpillar munching away on one of the sky-blue blossoms. He's a very hungry caterpillar. Did we say "hungry?" He's ravenous. Absolutely ravenous! 

It's a tobacco budworm, Heliothis virescens, as identified by UC Davis distinguished professor Art Shapiro, an expert on Lepidopterans who has monitored butterfly populations in central California since 1972--and also studies moths. (See his butterfly website.)

In its adult stage, the tobacco budworm will become a moth. (If we let it!)

In its larval stage, it can vary in color from pale green to pink to dark red to maroon, according to a University of Florida entomological fact sheet. 

"Tobacco budworm is principally a field crop pest, attacking such crops as alfalfa, clover, cotton, flax, soybean, and tobacco," the University of Florida entomologists related. "However, it sometimes attacks such vegetables as cabbage, cantaloupe, lettuce, pea, pepper, pigeon pea, squash, and tomato, especially when cotton or other favored crops are abundant. Tobacco budworm is a common pest of geranium and other flower crops such as ageratum, bird of paradise, chrysanthemum, gardenia, geranium, petunia, mallow, marigold, petunia, snapdragon, strawflower, verbena, and zinnia."

Naturalist-photographer Greg Kareofelas, a Bohart Museum of Entomology associate, remembers rearing one that he plucked from his geraniums a few years ago. We are not going to rear this one. Tobacco budworms are not our buddies.

This afternoon honey bees tried to push the pest away. They did not succeed. 

Tomorrow the California scrub jays nesting and chirping in the cherry laurels probably will! 

A honey bee heads for a patch of California golden poppies. She finds a blossom she likes. 

Bee: "Hey, Goldie Locks, I'm here to collect some nectar and pollen."

Goldie Locks: "You're what?"

Bee: "I want to collect some of your nectar and pollen."

Goldie Locks: "Don't you know that we California golden poppies don't have nectar--just pollen?"

Bee: "Oh? Really? I did not know that. Oh, well, pollen, then!"

Goldie Locks: "Sorry, bee. You're late. Don't you know that I close in the late afternoon?"

Bee: "Closed? What am I supposed to do?"

Goldie Locks: "Do? Come back tomorrow when I'm open for bees-ness."

Bee: Shakes her head, stomps her feet, and buzzes away.

Moral of the story: The early birds get the worm and the early bees get the pollen. And California golden poppies provide no nectar, just pollen. 

Sometimes you hear about bored teenagers trashing bee hives by deliberately throwing rocks at them or gleefully tipping them over.

But a truck driver who deliberately plows through a bee yard on private property and crushes 40 colonies?

That's unreal. 

But that's what happened last week to bee scientist Caroline Yelle, owner of Pope Canyon Queens, LLC, Winters. Under cover of darkness, a truck driver drove over and destroyed her bee hives, located in a remote rural orchard outside the community. 

To try to recoup her loss, her friends urged her to post a Go Fund Me page. It's now online at https://gofund.me/d3422c15 with a goal of $3000. 

Yelle is one of the nation's few women-owned queen bee breeder businesses; she established the business in 2013 at age 25.  A native of Canada, she mainly breeds Carniolans, Apis mellifera carnica, a subspecies of the western honey bee and "a hybrid that we selected in Canada and we reproduce here in California for stronger genes." She keeps bees in Winters, Vacaville and Napa.

Her mission, as posted on her Pope Canyon Queens website "is to improve the genetic quality of queen bees available to commercial breeders in North America by combining exceptional knowledge and expertise with robust genetics. Our breeding program is pioneering bee genetics through specialized selection, genetic diversification and high quality nutrition. Our process ensures that queens produced through our breeding program breed offspring which are better able to defend themselves against the many killers of today's bee population; mites, viruses, bacteria, pesticides, commercial beekeeping stresses, pollution, depleting floral diversity, and our world's ever-changing ecosystems. The decline in the world's bee population is unprecedented, making our work urgently necessary. We are rising to the challenge and breeding a better tomorrow." 

“I have dedicated my life since I'm 16 years old to beekeeping and helping the community by choosing every day to help save our pollinators,” Yelle wrote on the Go Fund Me page. 

The truck driver deliberately killed thousands of her bees “just for the sake of it, on private property." She scooped up dead bees, broken boxes, empty cans of beer,  hard liquor and energy drinks, and other trash the vandals left behind. 

The donations won't replace the bees that died that day, but “your contributions could help us to replace the boxes and set us up to replace the colonies,” she noted. If donations exceed the $3000 goal, Pope Valley Queens "will be putting all your donations toward our queen breeding program to help us developing more tools and resources for the bees.”

Do people really care about bees? The deliberate killing of such livestock as sheep, cattle or goats would have drawn much more ire. But bees, too, are livestock. And one-third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees.

The deliberate destruction of someone's livelihood drew irate comments, and rightfully so, on the Facebook page, Winters Community Info and Tips. Some addressed the importance of bees. Wrote one person: "I think our community knows very well how important bees are and I'm so sorry to hear what happened to yours. I hope police will find the culprits and you will at least be reimbursed for your losses. In this case we all lose!"

This is not Caroline Yelle's first major bee loss. On Aug. 19, 2020, Yelle, then 28, lost 500 hives when the lightning-sparked Hennessey Fire swept through rural Vacaville, destroying the home she lived in on Quail Valley Road, Vacaville, as well as most of her business. 

Yelle is a close associate of bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey of Washington State University, former manager of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis; and bee breeder-geneticist Kim Fondrk, retired from the Laidlaw facility, UC Davis.  

Yelle and Cobey talk about bees on Civil Eats:  https://civileats.com/2022/04/20/civil-eats-tv-let-them-bee/

Hello there, little leafcutter bee! Yes, you, foraging on the sky-blue Chinese Forget-Me-Nots!

You're just in time for National Pollinator Week!

Leafcutter bees, family Megachilidae, are so named because the females cut leaves and petals  (perfectly round holes!) to line their nests. Smaller than honey bees--and much faster, leafcutter bees are easily recognizable by the black-white bands on their abdomen.

The females do all the work. They gather pollen and nectar, make the nests from the leaf and petal fragments, and lay eggs. They seal the egg chambers with the leaves or flower petals.

In our pollinator garden, leafcutter bees are quite fond of Chinese Forget-Me-Nots, Cynoglossum amabile. "Many wild bees prefer flowers in the violet-blue range—in part because these blossoms tend to produce high volumes of nectar," according to an Oct. 18, 2017 article in Science.org. 

Of the 4000 bee species known in the United States, about 1600 reside in California. The leafcutter bee is just one of them. The family, Megachilidae,  includes these leafcutting bees:Megachile angelarum, M. fidelis and M. montivaga; the alfalfa leafcutting bee, M. rotundata; the Mason bee, Osmia coloradensis; and the blue orchard bee (BOB), Osmia lignaria propinqua.

For more information on California's bees, read California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists (Heyday), the work of UC-affiliated scientists, Gordon Frankie,  Robbin Thorp (1933-2019), Barbara Ertter and Rollin Coville.  

Thorp, a global and legendary authority on bees and a distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, died June 7, 2019 at his home in Davis. He was 85.