A streak of gray, but don't wash it away.

The gray hairstreak is a butterfly.

We spotted this delicate-looking butterfly (Strymon melinus) on a red pincushion flower (Scabiosa) this week in Winters, Yolo County.

Gray on red. Fauna on flora. A Strymon on a Scabiosa.

Butterfly expert Arthur Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, includes hairstreaks in his book, Field Guide to Butterflies of the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley Regions (University of California Press).

If you look on his website, Art Shapiro's Butterfly Site, you can read all about the butterflies he studies.

Of the gray hairstreak, Shapiro writes: "This is one of the most polyphagous butterflies known, recorded on host plants in many families."

You'll often see the butterfly on the mallows, Spanish lotus, bird's-foot trefoil, white clover, alfalfa, and scores of other plants. We saw it nectaring on catmint (Nepeta) in our yard.

And on Scabiosa. A Strymon on a Scabiosa.

It's been dubbed "The Manhattan Project of Entomology."

And it may have "the potential to revolutionize the way we think about insects," says Richard Levine, communications program manager of the Entomological Society of America (ESA).

Call it "The Manhattan Project of Entomology." Call it "The i5k Initiative." Call it "The 5,000 Insect Genome Project." They're one and the same and will involve entomologists worldwide sequencing the genomes of 5,000 insects and other arthropods over the next five years.

The goal, as the article in the current edition of American Entomologist states, is “to improve our lives by contributing to a better understanding of insect biology and transforming our ability to manage arthropods that threaten our health, food supply, and economic security."

"We hope that generating this data will lead to better models for insecticide resistance, better models for developing new pesticides, better models for understanding transmission of disease, or for control of agricultural pests," Daniel Lawson, a coordinator at the European Bioinformatics Institute, told Levine. "Moving into the genetics era revolutionizes what you can do, what you can try to assay in your species, what you can infer from your experiments."

Professor Gene E. Robinson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, pointed out: "This will provide information that breeders would need to look for ways of dealing with insect resistance to pesticides. It would also provide geneticists with information on what might be vulnerable points in an insect's makeup, which could be used for novel control strategies."

The first step? Entomologists will sign up to create wiki pages.

"We're trying to find out who's working on what insects, and if they feel that having genomic information about their insects would help," professor Susan J. Brown of Kansas State University told Levine. "Quite a few researchers are probably working on transcriptomics, looking at the genes that are transcribed under certain contexts, environmental conditions or life stages. Looking at the whole genome will help us understand these comparatively and not just in one organism."

This is an exciting project with entomologists networking on a project that will benefit us all. We're especially interested in insects of agricultural and medical importance.

Read Richard Levine's piece in American Entomologist at http://entsoc.org/PDF/2011/AE-15k.pdf.

The feather-legged fly looks as if it were formed by a committee.

It's about the size of a house fly, but there the similarity ends.

Black head and thorax, hind legs fringed with a "comb" of short black hairs, and an abdomen that's the color of honey--bright orange honey.

It's one of those insects that prompts folks (including many entomologists) to ask: "What's THAT?"

We took a photo of "what's THAT?" yesterday on a Yolo County farm. Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, identified it as family Tachinidae, genus Tichopoda and species, probably T. pennipes.

It's a parasitoid. The female lays her eggs inside squash bugs, stink bugs and other agricultural pests.

It was probably introduced here from Europe. Squash growers and other farmers employ it as a biological control agent.

To us, it appears to be a double agent: distinctive and deadly.

Don't let that honey-colored abdomen fool you...

To attract honey bees to your garden, it's a good idea to let the artichokes flower.

Sure, you could pick them for your dinner, but you'd be depriving honey bees of theirs.

At the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at UC Davis, the artichokes are beginning to flower. The haven, a half-acre bee friendly garden, is a demonstration garden planted next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road.

It's open from dawn to dusk (no admission fee). The key goals of the garden are to provide bees with a year-around food source, to raise public awareness about the plight of honey bees, and to encourage visitors to plant bee-friendly gardens of their own. It also serves as a research garden.

The Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven is a treasure, and fulfilling the needs of bees adds to that treasure.