Flameskimmer with a bee breakfast. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

You want to let Big Red to stay in.

This male flameskimmer hung out in our pollinator garden in Vacaville on July 3 for a little over five hours. He perched on a bamboo stake, periodically circled to grab a few bees, and then returned to his post to eat them.

Flameskimmers, Libellula saturata, are a joy to watch as they circle, curve and dip to snatch their prey in flight. When they perch, they sometimes look like a biplane. 

If you love dragonflies, note that the Bohart Museum of Entomology created an educational poster, "Dragonflies of California," the work of then doctoral candidate Fran Keller (now a professor at Folsom Lake College) and naturalist/photographer Greg Kareofelas of Davis. It focuses on 18 dragonflies commonly found in the Golden State. Keller is now a professor at Folsom Lake College. The Bohart Museum, home of nearly eight million insect specimens, is temporarily closed to the public due to COVID-19 pandemic precautions but the gift shop is online.

Kareofelas identified this flameskimmer as a male. 

After an afternoon sunning and dining in our garden, Big Red left for parts unknown. 

He was back today to stake out his claim and snatch a few more bees (in this case, Melissodes agilis and Svastra obliqua expurgata). Table for one? He needs no reservations, no menu and no wait staff.

This is not something you see every day.

When Lynn Kimsey, director of the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology and UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology, Department of Entomology and Nematology, recently traveled to San Luis Obispo, she saw a honey bee "licking a baby acorn" on an oak tree.

Why was the bee licking a baby acorn?

In her investigation, Kimsey discovered why.

"Apparently the acorn weevil larvae developing in the acorns secrete some kind of sugars--sweet pee if you must. I didn't realize this but apparently acorn honey is a big deal in Eurasia and beekeepers will intentionally move their colonies under oaks for this reason. Weevil pee honey… weird."

"Humans definitely collect the honey from the bees," Kimsey related. "The amount of sweetness from the acorns is way too little for us to do anything with directly." 

If you look on YouTube for oak honey, you'll find a product from northern Greece described as "rich, thick, chocolatey, and packed with minerals, enzymes, propolis and goodness; lower glycemic index than most honeys therefore suitable for people wishing to consume a low sugar honey."  (See https://youtu.be/vFpH8YBcQlw.)

Indeed. And there's a Raw Honey Shop based in Brighton, UK, that explains what it's all about:  "What makes the acorns weep the fluid?  There is a species of weevil, which is known as the acorn weevil (Curculio glandium). This weevil burrows into the acorns which causes them to release a sweet fluid, which the bees collect directly from the acorn and then convert it into honey." (Check out their video.)

Who knew? 

"Ant Man" Brendon Boudinot says the mandibles on the Vacaville ant are "quite chunky for this genus, Formica, so it might be a new species."

Carpenter ants? 

If you walk over the Ulatis Creek Bridge, Vacaville, to enter Andrews Park for the Fourth of July celebration on Sunday, you may be surprised.

There's a 12-inch sticker of a carpenter ant at the end of the bridge.

"Pretty cute, says the entomologist," quipped entomologist Lynn Kimsey, director of the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology and distinguished professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.

Noted "Ant Man" Brendon Boudinot recognized it immediately as a carpenter ant, of course. He knows his ants, inside and out.

 Boudinot, who holds a doctorate in entomology (2020) from UC Davis, studying ants with major professor Phil Ward, is in Jena, Germany for a two-year Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship to research evolutionary and comparative anatomy.

 "Haha awesome!" he wrote in an email. "Technically, I would consider this imperfectly identifiable because it lacks sufficient detail."

"However, using my sense of ant gestalt and the local fauna, I would say this is a Formica. The mandibles are quite chunky for the genus, so it might be a new species!"

If you ever want to talk ants, Boudinot is your man, the ant man. He wrote his dissertation on "Systematic and Evolutionary Morphology: Case Studies on Formicidae, Mesozoic Aculeata, and Hexapodan Genitalia" and received the coveted 2020 Robert E. Snodgrass Memorial Research Award from the Entomological Society of America (ESA), an award recognizing outstanding research by a PhD student who has completed a research thesis or dissertation in arthropod morphology, systematics, taxonomy, or evolution. (Nominees are scored on honors, awards, achievements and recognition; recommendations of professors and advisors; grantsmanship, publications, creativity and innovation of thesis or dissertation; and contribution to morphology.) Boudinot also drew widespread recognition when he won the 2019 John Henry Comstock Award, the top graduate student award given by ESA's Pacific Branch. The branch encompasses 11 Western states, U.S. territories, and parts of Canada and Mexico. 

But back to the Art of the Ant.

Who did it? And why? A myrmecologist or an ant enthusiast or a future entomologist? 

Maybe someone who read the April 5, 2021 feature, "Let Us Now Praise Tiny Ants," in the New York Times?

"We share our world with at least 15,000 unique species of ants — although this is surely an underestimate, as we have no way to count the number of species still unknown to science," wrote journalist Brooke Jarvis. "It is hard to express how ubiquitous they are. If you were to put all the animal life in a Brazilian rainforest on a scale, more than one-quarter of the weight would come just from ants. Even the sidewalks of New York City — where pedestrians walk unknowingly above armies of pavement ants that undertake huge, deadly turf wars each spring, dismembering each other in epic battles for territory — are teeming. One study found an average of 2.3 ant species on a given city median, doing the invisible work of making fallen potato chips and hot dogs disappear by the pound. Even in our densest habitations, there are orders of magnitude more of them than there are of us."

So during the Fourth of July celebration in Andrews Park, when fireworks explode and people applaud and cheer, will they remember that ants are all around them? Probably not. Still, as Jarvis wrote there are "more of them than there are of us."

Including one "permanent resident" on the bridge. Yes!

Life is not always sunny for the sunflower bee, Svastra obliqua, a native longhorned bee.

The gals have trouble foraging when a male longhorned bee, Melissodes agilis, targets them.

The male M. agilis are very territorial--and their kamikaze-like maneuvers are spectacular.

The gal Svastras try to ignore them until the dive-bombing results in direct hits.

We saw this female foraging this week on a Mexican sunflower, Tithonia rotundifola. We also saw her bolt after the male M. agilis hit his mark. Gotcha!

Score:

Male Melissodes agilis: 1
Female Svastra obliqua expurgata: 0.

(For more information on these two species and other bee species in California, see the Heyday publication, California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists, the work of UC-affiliated scientists Gordon Frankie, Robbin Thorp (1933-2019), Rollin Coville and Barbara Ertter. It's available on the UC ANR website and on other sites. Also access the YouTube video on Svastras by The Bees in Your Backyard.)