- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Sunflowers, native to the Americas, are spectacular, especially when you encounter a field of them. If you look closely, you'll see honey bees, sunflower bees and bumble bees working the flowers.
It's pollination at work.
To encourage backyard gardeners to grow sunflowers and collect data about the bees that visit them, the Great Sunflower Project provides free seeds and educational information.
You can obtain the Lemon Queen sunflower seeds from the Great Sunflower Project, from a local nursery or from a seed catalog.
Associate professor and biologist Gretchen LeBuhn of the University of California, Santa Barbara, started the project in 2008 as a way to get citizens interested in bee pollination.
"In 2008, we started this project as a way to gather information about our urban, suburban and rural bee populations," writes LeBuhn, considered "the queen bee" of the Great Sunflower Project. "We wanted to enlist people all over the U.S. and Canada to observe their bees and be citizen scientists. We asked them to plant sunflowers in their gardens so we could standardize study of bee activity and provide more resources for bees. Sunflowers are relatively easy to grow and are wildly attactive to bees."
Since 2008, the Great Sunflower Project has expanded its list of plants studied to include bee balm, cosmos, rosemary, coreopsis (tickseed), and purple coneflower.
"It’s time to turn off your television, take off those earphones, shut down that computer, go outside, and rediscover the wonder of nature," LeBuhn says.
Good advice.
That's one small step toward improving bee habitat--and human habitat, too.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
A sure sign of spring: trucks loaded with bee hives heading out to the almond orchards.
Yes, almond pollination season is almost here.
California has approximately 700,000 acres of almonds, and each acre requires two hives for pollination.
Since California doesn't have that many bee colonies, beekeepers from all over the country, some from as far away as Florida, are trucking in their bees.
A scene today in the Meadowview neighborhood, Sacramento: a truck loaded with hives and towing a forklift. The forklift? Quite necessary for easy movement and placement of the hives in the soggy orchards.
Ah, spring.
The almond pollination season begins around Feb. 10 and continues until approximately March 10. This encompasses the early, mid- and late varieties of almonds.
When asked today about the status of colony collapse disorder (CCD), Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, told us: "The colonies being delivered to the orchards currently should be in pretty good shape but CCD still is depleting those numbers in many commercial beekeeping operations in California and across the country."
Let's keep our fingers crossed.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
No, the bees and butterflies.
Professor Daniel Papaj of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, will speak on "Ecological and Evolutionary Perspectives on Learning in Bees and Butterflies" at the next UC Davis Department of Entomology noonhour seminar.
The seminar is set for 12:10 to 1 p.m., Wednesday, Feb. 3 in 122 Briggs Hall, Kleiber Drive. Papaj's talk will be Webcast; listen live.
This is the fifth in a series of winter seminars coordinated by graduate student Ian Pearse of the Rick Karban lab. Graduate students James Harwood and Amy Morice of the James Carey lab are Webcasting the seminars.
According to Papaj's Web site, his laboratory studies the "reproductive dynamics of insects in the context of coevolved interactions. We are particularly interested in how the flexibility of an animal's behavior or physiology permits it to maintain high performance in variable environments. Plant-insect interactions are our primary focus, including mainly plant-herbivore and plant-pollinator interactions. Host-parasite, predator-prey, intrasexual and intersexual interactions are considered as well. Within this species interaction context, research topics addressed in our laboratory are diverse, as reflected in a list of keywords that describe recent work."
This look into the fascinating world of insects should draw a capacity crowd.
Papaj's talk will be archived for future viewing. Just access this page to view all the UC Davis Department of Entomology lectures Webcast since February 2009.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
We’re outnumbered.
Plain as day. And they’re not going away.
The estimated ratio of insects to humans is 200 million to one, say Iowa State University entomologists Larry Pedigo and Marlin Rice in their newly published (sixth edition) textbook, Entomology and Pest Management.
There's an average of 400 million insects per acre of land, they say.
400 million!
Per acre.
“The fact is, today’s human population is adrift in a sea of insects,” they write in their introduction.
Well, what about biomass? Surely we outweigh these critters?
No, we don't. The
There you go. The insects are the land owners; we are the tenants. “They are the chief consumers of plants; they are the major predators of plant eaters; they play a major role in decay of organic matter; and they serve as food for other kinds of animals,” Pedigo and Rice write.
The good: they give us honey and pollinate our crops. They spin our silk. They serve as natural enemies of pests. They provide food for wildlife (not to mention food for some of us humans). They are scavengers. They provide us with ideas for our art work. They are fodder for our horror movies.
And what scientist hasn't benefitted from the inheritance studies of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogasta? What ecologist hasn't studied water pollution by examining the mayfly population? Mayflies are the counterpart of canaries in the coal mine.
The bad: they eat our food crops, forests and ornamental plants. They devour or spoil our stored grain. They chew holes in our clothing. They pester us. They annoy our animals, too.
The ugly: They can—and do—kill us. Think mosquitoes. Think malaria,
Ironically, despite the huge numbers of insects, many people don't know the meaning of the word, entomology, the science of insects. They should. Insects outnumber us and always will. They've lived on the earth longer than us (400 million years) and adapt to changes better than we do. Most are tiny. Most can fly. And most reproduce like there's no tomorrow.
"Based solely on numbers and biomass, insects are the most successful animals on earth," the authors claim.
You can't argue with that.
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- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
As a child, Dennis Price loved to watch the honey bees. “I could sit and watch them all day,” he said.
He still does. Love the honey bees, that is.
And he never tires of watching them.
If you attended the California State Fair on Sunday, Aug. 17 or Saturday, Aug. 23, you probably saw the enthusiastic Davis resident, now a beekeeper, in the honeybee booth in the California Foodstyle building. He and his partner Karen Flores were handing out honey samples and answering questions about bees, especially about the bee observation hive where visitors could watch the queen bee, worker bees and drones.
“About one-fourth of them were afraid of the bees, but about one-half of them were as fascinated with bees as I am,” Price said.
Dennis Price is a new beekeeper. Since April. So far, his six hives have produced 81 pounds of honey. The samples he served were absolutely delicious. Liquid gold.
Price is a graduate of UC Davis, but not in entomology. “I used to play racquetball with Larry Godfrey (Extension entomologist at UC Davis), though,” he said.<
Price is a 1989 graduate of UC Davis (chemistry and toxicology) and now works for ESA Biosciences, a company based in Chelmsford, Mass. He's the Western regional account manager, traveling from a route from Seattle to Hawaii, but mostly throughout California.
And in his “spare” time, he keeps bees.
“Bees are so underappreciated and so ignored and they work so hard for us,” Price said.
Above his head in the California Beekeepers Association booth was a sign that read:
- The average honey bee makes just 1/2 teaspoon of honey during her lifetime
- Honey bees fly about 55,000 miles just to make one pound of honey. That's equal to 1.5 times around the world.
- One third of your diet is derived from insect-pollinated plants, and 80 percent of that is done by honey bees.
It used to be that newborn pigs (such as those below) hogged the attention of fairgoers at the California State Fair. They still do, but make way for the bees.
The bees are buzzing around the sunflowers in the garden section and they're making honey in the California Foodstyle Building.
And if you're like me, you'll go to the fair just to see the bees.
You have until Sept. 1 to check them out.