- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
These bees are carpenters.
These bees are art.
Professor Jeffrey Granett, who retired from the UC Davis Department of Entomology in January 2007, now spends must of his time working on his art.
He created a hanging piece for "The Bees at The Bee" art show, to be held from 3 to 8 p.m., Saturday, May 8 at the Sacramento Bee's open courtyard, 2100 Q St. The art show, organized by Sacramento artist Laurelin Gilmore, is a benefit for the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis.
It's open to the public, it's free, and it's the place to "bee" on May 8.
Artists, invited from a 12-county area to participate in the show, will donate a portion of their sales to the Laidlaw facility for honey bee research.
And what did our retired entomologist submit for the show? Think carpenter bee. Think "tattooed" carpenter bee. His work is titled "Carpenter Bee With Tattoo."
Granett, who taught arthropod pest management at UC Davis and researched agricultural entomology, says he has no professional experiences with carpenter bees “but I enjoyed seeing them turning my backyard fence to sawdust.”
“The insect-art is a carpenter bee, probably male but I'm not sure,” Granett said. “It has tattoos on its femurs and tibias and should be hung as if it were hovering over a flower. It is cut from a linocut printed on Somerset paper with ink washes for the coloring. Although I tried to make the insect somewhat realistic morphologically, it clearly has some anthropomorphic characteristics for the viewer to figure out.”
Granett, who received his bachelor of science degree in agricultural research from Rutgers University and his master’s degree and doctorate in entomology from Michigan State University, remains an entomologist at heart, but his interests now include docenting at the Crocker Art Museum and "learning from my grandson."
And creating multi-media art, "Carpenter Bee with a Tattoo."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Mark your calendars.
Saturday, May 8 is the "Bees at The Bee" art show.
The art show, featuring the work of bee artists from throughout much of Northern California, is a benefit for honey bee research at the University of California, Davis. The occasion? The Sacramento Bee's annual Second Saturday event.
"Bees at The Bee" takes place from 3 to 8 p.m. in newspaper's courtyard at 2100 Q St. Admission is free, as is parking in The Bee's Q lot.
Some 60 talented artists from a 12-county area submitted work that includes acrylic paintings, watercolors, pen and ink drawings, metal and paper sculptures, photographs, fused glass plates, pendants, a fleece blanket, a neckpiece, crocheted multimedia, collages, monoprint-woodcut, individually painted CDS, and a scrimshaw engraving on a mammoth ivory.
A portion of the art sales will go directly to honey bee research at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis.
“I’m really blown away by the level of quality, the ingenuity, and the variety of content we’re seeing for this show,” said Sacramento artist Laurelin Gilmore, who is coordinating the show. “It’s a relatively narrow theme, but concern for the plight of the honey bees is filtered through each artist in a different way, and the results run the gamut from funny to beautiful to profound. Every time I see a new piece for this show, I am re-energized!”
"Bees at The Bee" will feature a festival-type atmosphere with live music, refreshments and lots of fun things to do, see and sample. For example, visitors can see a bee observation hive and single out the queen bee, workers and drones. They can sample a honey product--the Honey Lovers line of Gimbal's Fine Candies, based in San Francisco. The company is donating five percent of the proceeds from the sale of Honey Lovers (fruit chews made with natural honey) for UC Davis bee research.
One of the artists displaying her work is Marilyn Judson of Davis. She's passionate about calligraphy and paper sculpture.
“I have always loved letters and studied calligraphy in London and taught calligraphy in the local school district and the Davis Art Center,” Judson said.
“Paper sculpture is something I have always want to do and I really have enjoyed the possibilities that it produces,” she said. “Manipulating the paper into a three-dimensional piece can be challenging.”
Her paper sculptures, she acknowledges, include "lots of insects and flowers." Her husband, Charles, is an emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis.
Her paper sculptures of moth brains, moth antennae and bacteria are as stunning as they are intricate.
For the art show, Judson submitted two pieces: a framed paper sculpture titled "Queen Bee" and a framed caligraphy and watercolor featuring a quote from the book, “Archy and Mehitable” by Don Marquis.
Marquis (1878-1937), an American humorist and longtime columnist for The New York Sun, claimed that a cockroach named Archy jumped on his typewriter at night and wrote bits of wit and wisdom.
Archy couldn't punch two keys at the same time so his work contained no punctuation or capitalization. In fact, he wrote his name as "archy."
The "night-writing" cockroach wrote this:
as a representative
of the insect world
i have often wondered
on what man bases his claims
to superiority
everything he knows he has had
to learn whereas we insects are born
knowing everything we need to know
To really appreciate those words, you just have to see Marilyn Judson's amazing calligraphy, illustrated with colorful insects.
One of them is, yes, a honey bee.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
This is part of the Wednesday spring seminars sponsored by the UC Department of Entomology. Host will be Marcel Rejmanek, professor of Evolution and Ecology at UC Davis.
Folks can listen live by accessing this link. Later the Webcast will be archived on the UC Davis Department of Entomology Web site for easy retrieval.
"My main area of interest is ecology and evolutionary ecology of insect herbivores, especially in rainforest ecosystems," Novotny says. "I am particularly interested in local and regional patterns of tropical insect diversity, organization of plant-insect food webs, and plant-insect interactions. Further, I am also interested in practical problems of biological surveys, biodiversity conservation, environmental education and training of indigenous tropical ecologists."
While here, Novotny will meet with faculty and graduate students.
"If you have not read Professor Novotny's book Notebooks from New Guinea, it is definitely worth reading!" said host Rejmanek in an e-mail.
Oxford University Press published the book last May. It's officially titled Notebooks from New Guinea: Field Notes of a Tropical Biologist.
Reviewers consider Novotny a world-class researcher and a brilliant writer.
Reviewer and ecologist Francis Q. Brearley of the Manchester Metropolitan University, wrote last October in Higher Times Education:
"The big question framing the research of Czech entomologist Vojtech Novotny is that of why there are so many species of insects in tropical rainforests. His investigations, for the past decade, have focused on the tropical forests of Papua New Guinea, a land of incredible diversity and contrasts. Notebooks from New Guinea is presented as a series of short chapters of sociopolitical musings, anecdotes, adventures and misadventures in Papua, New Guinea, and details some of the unique challenges facing researchers who have chosen to work there."
Tune in Wednesday for a close look at New Guinea and an even closer look at a scientist whose research, quick wit and candor bring it all together.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
This spectacular plant attracts bees like a honey-laden hive does hungry bears.
The tower of jewels (Echium wildprettii), native to the Canary Islands, is a biennal; it flowers only in the second year and then dies. So, for the first year, it looks quite insignificant. The second year: it shoots up an amazing nine or 10 feet, ablaze with blossoms the color of rubies.
If you ever see a tower of jewels blooming, you'll remember it. One bloomed last year in the Storer Garden in the UC Davis Arboretum. it drew scores of visitors toting cameras.
The same will hold true when several towers bloom next year in the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a half-acre bee friendly garden planted last fall next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis.
Visitors to the haven will see the "tiny" Echiums during the public opening on Sept. 11. They won't see the regal beauty unfold until 2011.
Meanwhile, we're savoring the three towers in our own bee friendly garden. So are the honey bees, hover flies, bumble bees, carpenter bees, butterflies and hummingbirds.
The scouts (bees) arrive as soon as the temperature hits 50 degrees. Then they head back to their hives to alert the foragers. You can almost hear them Waggle-Dancing: "Fine quality, large quantity--hurry, hurry!" By mid-morning, the towers are abuzz with bees. By mid-afternoon, the bees sound like jet engines.
A tower of bees.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's amazing what a little Photoshopping can do to a bee on blue.
We captured an image this week of a pollen-packing honey bee on Phacelia campanularia, also known as California blue bells or desert blue bells.
It's a deep inky-blue wildflower that's native to southwestern deserts of California. It's planted in a wildflower patch behind the Sciences Laboratory Building on the UC Davis campus. There it mingles with the white-petalled yellow tidy tips and other wildflowers.
We ran the image through "poster edges" of Photoshop and voila! It's even more inky blue.
Maybe that's what the bee sees.
