“Dear Bee Scientists,” wrote 6-year-old Katie Brown of Phoenix, Ariz.  “I am giving this money to you so you can help the bees. I love the bees.”

She enclosed $20 from her allowance savings.

Hannah Fisher Gray, 11, of Wilmington, Del., asked her friends to skip birthday presents for her and instead help support honey bee research.

Hannah collected $110 at her birthday party and then contributed $110 from her own money so that both UC Davis and Pennsylvania State University could benefit.

The girls are the newest bee crusaders, said Lynn Kimsey, chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology.

“These are very generous gifts from the heart,” Kimsey said. “It’s very touching that these girls would take a special interest in helping us save the honey bees.”

Hannah, a fifth grader from Wilmington, Del., enclosed the $110 check in a letter to professor Kimsey.

In the letter, Hannah expressed her concern “about our environment and its creatures, especially the honey bees.”

“I saw the Häagen-Dazs commercial and I instantly wanted to learn more,” she wrote. “I researched about bees and learned ways I could help, such as donating money, using honey instead of sugar, planting honeybee-friendly plants and supporting beekeepers.”

 “For my birthday party, I asked my guests to make gifts of money to support honeybee research instead of giving presents for me. The total of these gifts was $110. I am making a matching gift of $110 of my own money, and splitting the gift between the University of California, Davis and Pennsylvania State University.”

One of Hannah’s birthday gifts was a T-shirt proclaiming “Bee a Hero.” And, in keeping with her passion for bees, she dressed in a honey bee costume last Halloween.

Hannah learned of the troubling bee crisis from the national Häagen-Dazs campaign, launched Feb. 19 to create awareness for the plight of the honey bee. Nearly 40 percent of Häagen-Dazs brand ice cream flavors are linked to fruits and nuts pollinated by bees.

Katie Brown learned of the plight of the honey bees through the Häagen-Dazs Web site, www.helpthehoneybees.com.

Her mother, Molly Pont-Brown, said that Katie "gets a portion of her allowance each week for charity and had been wanting to help the bees and saving up for a long time, so we were looking online for ways to help the bees and stumbled upon their (Häagen-Dazs) program.”

In her donation letter to UC Davis, Katie drew the Häagen-Dazs symbol, “HD Loves HB,” and two smiling bees. She signed her name with three hearts.

Eager to share information with her classmates on the plight of the honey bees, Katie took photos of foods that bees pollinate and served Honey Bee Vanilla ice cream, the new flavor that Häagen-Dazs created last year as part of its bee crisis-awareness campaign.

Katie is "about to give another $40 additionally from her Star Student Week," her mother said.  The six-year-old chose to donate $2 per child to the honey bee research program instead of buying the customary trinkets for them.  Katie also sent each classmate a “bee-mail” from the Häagen-Dazs Web site to let them know about it.

For Christmas, Katie received a Häagen-Dazs bee shirt and bee books from her family. Her grandmother in California is giving her a “bee friendly garden.” Katie’s next birthday party will feature a bee theme, Honey Bee Vanilla ice cream, and will be a benefit for honey bee research.

“What a great thing (the drive to save the bees) for Häagen-Dazs to do,” Molly Pont-Brown wrote in a letter to UC Davis.  “And, of course, we appreciate all your department is doing to help the very important honeybees with your research, as well!”

When told of the Delaware girl’s bee crusader efforts, Katie’s mother said, “It’s fun to hear that there are other little bee crusaders out there, as well.”

As part of its national campaign, Häagen-Dazs last February committed a total of $250,000 for bee research to UC Davis and Pennsylvania State University; formed a seven-member scientific advisory board; created the new ice cream flavor; and launched the Web site, www.helpthehoneybees.com to offer more information on the “unstung heroes.”  The Web site includes information on how to donate to the two honey bee research programs.

The Häagen-Dazs brand is also funding a design competition to create a half-acre honey bee haven garden at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis. The deadline to submit entries is Jan. 30.

UC Davis Extension Apiculturist Eric Mussen, a member of the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty for 32 years, said the bee population "still has not recovered from previous losses."  Some of the nation's beekeepers have reported losing one-third to 100 percent of their bees due to colony collapse disorder (CCD), in which bee mysteriously abandon their hives. He attributes CCD to multiple factors, including diseases, parasites, pesticides, malnutrition, stress and climate change.

"Bees pollinate about 100 agricultural crops, or about one-third of the food that we eat daily," Mussen said.

Those interesting in donating to the honey bee research program at UC Davis or learning more about the design competition for the honey bee haven can access the Department of Entomology home page.

If you meander over to the Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis campus, you'll see a very tiny predator that looks for all the world like a green leaf. It's the Gambian spotted-eye flower mantis and it's one of the many live specimens housed there.

It's green with pointed eyes (it appears to have a pointy little head, too) and it grows to one-inch in length. Its scientific name is Pseudoharpax virescens (order Mantodea) and it's found in Gambia, the smallest country (in square miles) on the African continent.

And at the Bohart Museum of Entomology.

Bohart public outreach coordinator Brian Turner says that flower mantises spend their time hiding in flowers, waiting to ambush prey. It dines on insects.

If threatened, the Gambian spotted-eye flower mantis will lift its wings to expose its orange and purple coloring. This, Turner says, "will likely startle potential predators and cause them to lose track of the mantis when it lowers its wings again."

The Bohart Museum of Entomology,  founded in 1946, is located in 1124 Academic Surge. It is directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.

Dedicated to teaching, research and service, the museum houses the seventh largest insect collection in North America.  The global collection totals more than seven million specimens. It also houses many live specimens, including Madagascar hissing cockroaches, Vietnamese centipedes, walking sticks, assassin bugs...and....mantids.

If you've been around honey bee hives much, you know what a smoker is.

It's a tool that beekeepers use to inspect, manipulate or handle a hive. They smoke a hive to check the health of the colony, to add a little food, and to take a little honey. 

In a way, it's a form of "blowin' smoke" or a deception.

Moses Quinby of St. Johnsville, N.Y. invented the modern-day bee smoker in 1875. He created a firepot with bellows and a nozzle. Ancient Egyptians used pottery filled with smoldering cow dung to smoke the hives.  

Why smoke? Smoke calms the bees. It  masks the smell of the pheromone that the guard bees release to alert other bees of "trouble in River City." The bees smell the smoke and gorge on honey in preparation for The Big Move.

Survival instinct.

Pure and simple.

The result: mass confusion. And that leaves plenty of time for the beekeepers to go about their business.

As a child, I loved the old bee smoker that my father used to tend the hives. We marveled at the contraption that bellowed like an accordion and snorted puffs of smoke.  Sometimes my father would pump the bellows and teasingly blow smoke toward us. 

Today, over at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis, I watched bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey and assistant Elizabeth Frost smoke the hives and feed pollen to the bees.

They placed the smoker on a table and it kept blowing smoke. It curled into clouds and swirled into stripes and all I could think of was one word.

Art.

Pure and simple.

Know your ants.

If you want to identify red imported fire ants and other invasive ants found in the Pacific Island region, a newly launched Web site by an entomology graduate student at the University of California, Davis, will help you do just that.

Eli Sarnat created the interactive ant key to assist users in identifying invasive ant species commonly encountered in the Pacific Island region. The ant key includes 15 species recorded in California. These California ants include the common Argentine ant (the one you see marching up and down your kitchen), the red imported fire ant and the white-footed ant.

“This is one of the most clearly organized and informative sites I've ever seen,” said Lynn Kimsey, professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology. “It should be an invaluable resource for anyone needing information about pest ants in the Pacific Basin and elsewhere.”

Invasive ants threaten the native biodiversity, food security and quality of life, said Sarnat, who is researching the systematics, biogeography and conservation of ants in Fiji for his doctoral dissertation. He studies with major professor Phil Ward.

The ant key empowers professionals and non-professionals alike to identify the ants they encounter.

Sarnat compiled the guide using Lucid3 software. It covers four subfamilies, 20 genera and 44 species and includes:

• An overview of the species
• Diagnostic chart illustrating a unique combination of identification characters
• Comparison chart illustrating differences among species of similar appearance
• Video clip of the species behavior at food baits Image gallery that includes original specimen images and live images
• Nomenclature section detailing the taxonomic history of the species
• Links and references section for additional literature and online resources

The project was funded primarily by a cooperative agreement between UC Davis and the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Center for Plant Health Science and Technology.

Sarnat became interested in invasive ants while studying at UC Berkeley. He managed the field operations for the National Science Foundation-funded Fiji Terrestrial Arthropod Survey for a year before returning to his graduate studies at UC Davis. “My experience with the arthropod survey,” he said, “prompted me to switch my thesis To raise awareness about invasive ants in the country, Sarnat conducted a series of workshops in Fiji sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community.  

The Fiji islands are a group of volcanic islands in the South Pacific, southwest of Honolulu and north of New Zealand .

“Although the workshop participants all acknowledged the danger that ants like Solenopsis invicta (red imported fire ant) and Wasmannia auropunctata (little fire ant) posed to the environments, economies and public health of Fiji,” he said, “it was clear that none of the local entomologists or quarantine officers had the taxonomic expertise to recognize the species at ports of entry.”

With funding from New Zealand 's Ministry of Forests and Agriculture, Sarnat and two other ant specialists facilitated a workshop to train quarantine officers and entomologists from 13 Pacific Island countries and territories in invasive ant taxonomy.

“I was contracted to develop an interactive identification guide that allowed non-specialists to accurately identify the most common and dangerous invasive ants,” Sarnat said.

The instructors provided each participant with a microscope, laptop and a CD of the new identification guide at the five-day workshop, held at the University of the Pacific in Suva, Fiji.

“The workshop was a great success,” he said. “The participants felt newly empowered to prevent invasive ant incursions on their islands.”

Sarnat presented the first edition of the Pacific Invasive Ant key (PIAkey) at the 1st Pacific Invasive Ant conference in Honolulu in 2007. Interest expressed by the USDA’s Center for Plant Health Science and Technology, part of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Plant Protection and Quarantine (APHIS-PPQ), led to the production of the second edition, completed in 15 months.

Sarnat said the second edition represents a significant improvement over the first edition. It features fact sheets for each species, numerous specimen images and live images, videos of the ants feeding at baits, an illustrated glossary of technical terms, and an illustrated Lucid key to 44 species of invasive ants.

“Taxonomy can be a difficult field to learn because it has traditionally been taught as a body of knowledge passed down from mentors to students or through scattered and often old literature,” he said. “One must also examine specimens that exist only in a few museums across the world.”

The most exiting aspect of PIAkey, Sarnat said, is that it empowers non-specialists—those not trained by a mentor, or with no access to old literature or far-off museum collections--to use the recent technologies of digital images, the Internet, and an interactive identification software like Lucid to make accurate identifications themselves.

Last year the Bohart Museum of Entomology published a color poster of Sarnat’s auto-montages of the heads of 12 common invasive ants. The poster, “Pacific Invasive Ants,” is available at the Bohart Museum , located at 1124 Academic Surge on the UC Davis campus or online.

Further information on Sarnat’s work is on his  Web site.