This week (June 22-28) is National Pollinator Week, and what better time to celebrate the honey bee than now?

The White House Victory Garden, planted the first day of spring on part of the South Lawn, now has thousands of new residents: honey bees (Apis mellifera). 

The two bee hives are a joy to see.  America's First Family has First Hives in its First Garden with First Bees that will soon provide First Honey. The "commander-in-chef" will add First Honey to the White House favorite recipes. 

Frankly, the South Lawn has never looked so good. The Rose Garden, where many a press conference takes place, pales in comparison. The Victory Garden is a victory for sustainable agriculture, nutrition, education, the economy and the environment--not to mention the incredible feeling of accomplishment and the surpassed taste of freshly picked vegetables.

UC Davis' counterpart to a Victory Garden is the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a half-acre bee friendly garden to be planted this fall near the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Faciity. A Sausalito team submitted the winning design. The haven is expected to be dedicated in October. Honey bees will find a year-around food source, while visitors (the two-legged kind) will be able to savor the garden and glean new ideas for their own gardens.

Almond, apple, black elderberry, California buckwheat, California honeysuckle, coyote brush, lavender, Oregon grape, persimmon, plum, sage, tower of jewels...A veritable bee smorgasbord.

It will be National Pollinator Week every week and the honey bee will be the Poster Child every day.

That's the least we can do for the most important of all insects.

There's been trouble in paradise far too long.

Now, thanks to a generous donation from Häagen-Dazs, there will be a pollinator paradise--in the way of a bee friendly garden--at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis. 

Häagen-Dazs announced this week it will donate $125,000 to the UC Davis Department of Entomology to launch a nationwide design competition to create a one-half acre honey bee haven garden on Bee Biology Road. Häagen-Dazs has commited $65,000 of the $125,000 to establish the garden.

"The honey bee haven will be a pollinator paradise," said Lynn Kimsey, chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology. "It will provide a much needed, year-round food source for our bees at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility. We anticipate it also will be a gathering place to inform and educate the public about bees. We are grateful to Haagen-Dazs for its continued efforts to ensure bee health."

And you are invited to design it. The nationwide contest is open to anyone who can design a garden, using basic landscape principles. The rules, a list of bee friendly plants, design examples and other information is on the UC Davis Department of Entomology Web site.

Häagen-Dazs is funding the design competition and the California Center for Urban Horticulture at UC Davis is coordinating it. 

"The garden will be extremely helpful in demonstrating that bees are not a nuisance in the backyard, but instead are obtaining food and water essential for their survival,"  Eric Mussen, a Cooperative Extension apiculturist and a 32-year member of the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty, told us.

"Campus visitors," he said. "will be able to see which flowers are most attractive to foraging honey bees and how to space the flowers in order to have bees flying in the most convenient areas of their gardens.”

The deadline to submit a design is Jan. 30, 2009. Mail your design to the  California Center for Urban Horticulture, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Dean's Office, University of California, One Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616-8571. 

More information on the design competition is available from Melissa Borel,  program manager at UC Davis' California Center for Urban Horticulture, at (530) 752-6642 or email her at mjborel@ucdavis.edu.

You should also check out the Häagen-Dazs educational Web site at http://www.helpthehoneybees.com. In February they commited a total of $250,000 in honey bee research to UC Davis and Pennsylvania State. And now: another way to help the honey bees.    

The design competition winner will receive recognition on the Häagen-Dazs commemorative plaque at the entrance to the garden. Another gift will be a year's supply of Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

The real winners, however, are the honey bees. The bees at the Laidlaw facility will receive their very own fully-stocked pantry right in their back yard. 

A pollinator paradise, to be sure.

God in His wisdom made the fly
And then forgot to tell us why.
--Ogden Nash, "The Fly"

Every time I see a fly I think of the Ogden Nash poem.

Our bee-friendly garden is attracting a few flies. I captured this one visiting sage and then preserved it for posterity: I posterized it in Photoshop.

In football lingo, a curl is a spin on a football, which makes it swerve when it's kicked.

Honey bees can also "curl."

I took this photo today of a lone bee curled on purple sage. The worker bee was gathering nectar in the summerlike weather.

"That's the same position a bee has to get in to sting you,"  observed UC Davis apiculturist Eric Mussen. "She can't lie flat to sting. She curls up and stings."

 Like a comma.

A death "sentence" for her; a little pain for the victim.