- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
But it's not going to happen.
So here we are in our Vacaville pollinator garden, looking at the Chinese forget-me-nots. We see honey bees, leafcutter bees, syrphid flies, lady beetles, cabbage white butterflies, and other critters foraging. It's National Pollinator Week.
And then we see a pinkish caterpillar munching away on one of the sky-blue blossoms. He's a very hungry caterpillar. Did we say "hungry?" He's ravenous. Absolutely ravenous!
It's a tobacco budworm, Heliothis virescens, as identified by UC Davis distinguished professor Art Shapiro, an expert on Lepidopterans who has monitored butterfly populations in central California since 1972--and also studies moths. (See his butterfly website.)
In its adult stage, the tobacco budworm will become a moth. (If we let it!)
In its larval stage, it can vary in color from pale green to pink to dark red to maroon, according to a University of Florida entomological fact sheet.
"Tobacco budworm is principally a field crop pest, attacking such crops as alfalfa, clover, cotton, flax, soybean, and tobacco," the University of Florida entomologists related. "However, it sometimes attacks such vegetables as cabbage, cantaloupe, lettuce, pea, pepper, pigeon pea, squash, and tomato, especially when cotton or other favored crops are abundant. Tobacco budworm is a common pest of geranium and other flower crops such as ageratum, bird of paradise, chrysanthemum, gardenia, geranium, petunia, mallow, marigold, petunia, snapdragon, strawflower, verbena, and zinnia."
Naturalist-photographer Greg Kareofelas, a Bohart Museum of Entomology associate, remembers rearing one that he plucked from his geraniums a few years ago. We are not going to rear this one. Tobacco budworms are not our buddies.
This afternoon honey bees tried to push the pest away. They did not succeed.
Tomorrow the California scrub jays nesting and chirping in the cherry laurels probably will!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Hello there, little leafcutter bee! Yes, you, foraging on the sky-blue Chinese Forget-Me-Nots!
You're just in time for National Pollinator Week!
Leafcutter bees, family Megachilidae, are so named because the females cut leaves and petals (perfectly round holes!) to line their nests. Smaller than honey bees--and much faster, leafcutter bees are easily recognizable by the black-white bands on their abdomen.
The females do all the work. They gather pollen and nectar, make the nests from the leaf and petal fragments, and lay eggs. They seal the egg chambers with the leaves or flower petals.
In our pollinator garden, leafcutter bees are quite fond of Chinese Forget-Me-Nots, Cynoglossum amabile. "Many wild bees prefer flowers in the violet-blue range—in part because these blossoms tend to produce high volumes of nectar," according to an Oct. 18, 2017 article in Science.org.
Of the 4000 bee species known in the United States, about 1600 reside in California. The leafcutter bee is just one of them. The family, Megachilidae, includes these leafcutting bees:Megachile angelarum, M. fidelis and M. montivaga; the alfalfa leafcutting bee, M. rotundata; the Mason bee, Osmia coloradensis; and the blue orchard bee (BOB), Osmia lignaria propinqua.
For more information on California's bees, read California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists (Heyday), the work of UC-affiliated scientists,
Thorp, a global and legendary authority on bees and a distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, died June 7, 2019 at his home in Davis. He was 85.
