- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
We have a winner in the 4th annual Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble-Bee-of-the-Year Contest, sponsored by the Bohart Museum of Entomology. Details are being gathered, with the winner to be announced soon. Hint:it's a black-tailed bumble bee, Bombus melanopygus, and it was videoed on Jan. 1, the first day of the contest.
There's no winner yet, however, in the annual Beer-for-a-Butterfly Contest, sponsored by UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus Art Shapiro. This year it's in collaboration with the Bohart Museum, the drop-off point.
In the Beer-for-a-Butterfly contest, if you collect the first cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) of the year anywhere in the three-county area of Yolo, Sacramento and Solano, you can trade the live specimen for a beer or its equivalent, compliments of the good professor.
Just call it "Suds for a Bug."
Shapiro launched the contest in 1972 as part of his scientific research to determine the first flight of the year in the three-county area. His research involves long-term studies of butterfly life cycles and climate change.
What he's found: P. rapae is emerging earlier and earlier as the regional climate has warmed, Shapiro says. "Since 1972, the first flight of the cabbage white butterfly has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20."
Shapiro, who has monitored butterfly populations in Central California since 1972, and maintains a research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/, says the point of the contest "is to get the earliest possible flight date for statistical purposes. The rules require that the animal be captured and brought in alive to be verified. That way no one can falsely claim to have seen one or misidentify something else as a cabbage white."
The contest rules include:
- It must be an adult (no caterpillars or pupae) and be captured outdoors.
- It must be brought in alive to the Bohart Museum of Entomology, located in Room 1124, Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, during work hours, from 8 a.m. to noon, and from 1 to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. It must include full data (exact time, date and location of the capture) and the contact information of the collector (address, phone number and/or e-mail.) Brennen Dyer will certify that it is alive and refrigerate it. (If it's collected on a weekend or holiday, it can be kept in the refrigerator for a few days--do not freeze it, Shapiro says.)
- Shapiro is the sole judge.
Shapiro, who participates in his own contest, has been defeated only four times and those were by UC Davis graduate students. Adam Porter won in 1983; Sherri Graves and Rick VanBuskirk each won in the late 1990s; and Jacob Montgomery in 2016. The first three were his own graduate students.
Who won in 2023? Shapiro spotted the first butterfly of 2023 at 11:22 a.m., in West Sacramento, Yolo County. He did not collect the butterfly but recorded it as the first of the year. No one came forth with any other.
Shapiro is still looking for No. 1 in 2024.
"I tried this afternoon (Jan. 1 in West Sacramento)," Shapiro wrote in an email. No P. rapae.
But the good news, he recorded four species of another butterfly, the Nymphalids, in West Sacramento.
- Vanessa cardui, the Painted Lady
- Vanessa atalana, the Red Admiral
- Vanessa annabella, the West Coast Lady
- Nymphalis antiopa, the Mourning Cloak
Shapiro spotted one of each species, and in this order: antiopa, atalanta, annabella, cardui. "I don't think I've ever had a 4-species day so early!" he related. "As for New Year's Day records: antiopa i.1.18; atalanta i.1.96, i.1.12, i.1.13' annabella i.1.80. 92 and 96. Earliest cardui earliest is i.18.87. So it's the only free-and-clear record earliest. But a most extraordinary day! No rapae, but it sure felt like a rapae day!"
Tomorrow may be a rapae day....
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
And the plant may be a manzanita or ceonothus.
The Bohart Museum of Entomology is sponsoring its fourth annual Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble Bee-of-the-Year Contest, which begins at 12:01, Jan. 1, 2024. The first person to photograph a bumble bee in either Yolo or Solano and email it to the sponsor, the Bohart Museum, will receive a coffee cup designed with the endangered Franklin's bumble bee, the bee that Thorp monitored along the California-Oregon border for decades.
Contest coordinator Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum, said the image must be taken in the wild and emailed to bmuseum@ucdavis.edu, with the time, date and place.
The contest memorializes Professor Thorp (1933-2019), a global authority on bees and a UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor of entomology, who died June 7, 2019 at age 85. A 30-year member of the UC Davis faculty, he retired in 1994 but continued working until several weeks before his death. Every year he looked forward to seeing the first bumble bee in the area.
The previous winners:
2023: Ria deGrassi of Davis took a video of a Bombus melanopygus foraging on a Ceanothus in her backyard on Jan. 8 She had purchased the plant from the Arboretum plant sales.
2022: Maureen Page, then a doctoral candidate in the lab of pollination ecologist and professor Neal Williams, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and horticulturist Ellen Zagory, retired director of public horticulture for the Arboretum, tied for first by each photographing a bumble bee foraging on manzanita (Arctostaphylos) in the Arboretum. The time: 2:30 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 1. Page, who now holds a doctorate in entomology, photographed a Bombus melanopygus, while Zagory captured an image of the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii.
2021: Postdoctoral researcher Charlie Casey Nicholson of the Neal Williams lab and the Elina Lastro Niño lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, won the 2021 contest by photographing a B. melanopygus at 3:10 p.m., Jan. 14 in a manzanita patch in the Arboretum.
Thorp, a tireless advocate of pollinator species protection and conservation, co-authored two books in 2014, during his retirement: Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide (Princeton University,) and California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists (Heyday). Every year he looked forward to finding or seeing the first bumble bee in the area. He co-taught The Bee Course from 2002 to 2019. An intensive nine-day workshop affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and held annually at the Southwestern Research Station, Portal, Ariz., it draws participants from around the world, includkng conservation biologists, pollination ecologists, and other biologists who want to gain greater knowledge of the systematics and biology of bees.
For years, Thorp monitored Franklin's bumble bee, found only in a small range in Southern Oregon and Northern California, and now feared extinct. He last spotted it in 2006.
The bumble bee contest originated in 2012 with the "Bombus posse" of Thorp, Allan Jones, Gary Zamzow, Kim Chacon and Kathy Keatley Garvey, who engaged in a friendly contest to see who could find the first bumble bee of the year in the two-county area. The first bumble bee to emerge in the area is usually the black-tailed bumble bee. B. melanopygus, Thorp used to say. Another early bumble bee is the yellow-faced bumble bee, B. vosnesenskii.
The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens. It also houses a live petting zoo and an insect-themed gift shop. It is open to the public from 8 a.m. to noon, and from 1 to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday, excluding university holidays.