Entomology, or the scientific study of insects, is not just rural--it's urban, too.

Think bed bugs, cockroaches, carpet beetles and pantry pests, among others.

Those are some of the critters you'll learn about if you attend the Bohart Museum of Entomology's open house on urban entomology, set from 1 to 4 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 18 in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. It's free and family friendly.

Karey Windbiel-Rojas of the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM)--she's the associate director for Urban and Community IPM who serves as the area urban IPM advisor for Yolo, Sacramento and Solano counties--will be there to greet visitors and answer questions, as will Bohart Museum scientists and staff.

The pests the UC IPM scientist has been dealing with lately include carpet beetles, bed bugs and pantry pests. She'll hand out two newly published Quick Tips on carpet beetles and pantry pests, as well as information on other pests.  What are some of the other pests?  UC IPM's Quick Tips library ("some are household insects, some are pests in the garden/landscape, and some are obviously not arthropods") is here: http://ipm.ucanr.edu/QT/index.html.

The open house will focus on both household and garden insects, said Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum and professor of entomology at UC Davis. "The focus is urban entomology," she said. "We'll have out examples of all the wonderful household pests/friends and garden pests, along with the kinds of things they inspect restaurants for."

Like cockroaches, which thrive in human habitats and date back 350 millions years ago.

As an aside, Windbiel-Rojas promises to wear--or display--her cockroach costume that she wore on Halloween.

For the family arts and crafts activity, visitors will create mosaics rice in various colors. The youngsters will layer the colors in glass jars with lids. "This can serve as pretty artwork but also remind their parents to store grains in tightly sealed containers to keep pantry pests from infesting," Windbiel-Rojas said.

At a previous open house, youngsters glued dried rice and beans on insect images created by UC Davis entomology student/artist Karissa Merritt. It proved to be a popular activity.

Entomologist Jeff Smith, who curates the butterfly and moth collection at the Bohart, will be among the scientists at the open house.  He worked in the pesticide industry for years, training people about entomology, noted Tabatha Yang, the Bohart's education and outreach coordinator.

The open house is free and open to the public. A donation jar will be set up to help Bohart Museum specialist Brennen Dyer; he and his wife lost their home in the wildfire fueled by strong winds that destroyed most of Paradise, Butte County. Profits from the sale of items in the gift shop on Sunday are also earmarked for the Dyers. (See Bug Squad blog.)

The Bohart Museum, home of nearly eight million insect specimens, is the seventh largest insect collection in North America and houses the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of insect biodiversity. In addition, the Bohart features a live "petting zoo," comprised of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks, tarantulas and praying mantids; and a year-around gift shop, which is stocked with T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.

Other public weekend hours for the academic year 2018-2019 are:

• Saturday, Jan. 12, from 1 to 4 p.m.: "Time's Fun When You're Studying Flies"
• Saturday, Feb. 16, times vary: (campuswide) Biodiversity Museum Day
• Saturday, March 9, 1 to 4 p.m., "Eight-Legged Wonders"
• Saturday, April 14, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., (campuswide) UC Davis Picnic Day

The Bohart Museum's regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. It is closed to the public on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and on major holidays. Admission is free.  More information on the Bohart Museum is available on the website at http://bohart.ucdavis.edu or by contacting (530) 752-0493 or emailing bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.

Aphids, don't you just hate them?

Especially those oleander aphids that suck the very lifeblood out of our milkweed plants that we're struggling to save for monarch butterflies.

Just call aphids "The Enemy of the Gardener" or "The Enemy of the Milkweed."

The University of California Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) describes aphids as "small, soft-bodied insects with long slender mouthparts that they use to pierce stems, leaves, and other tender plant parts and suck out fluids. Almost every plant has one or more aphid species that occasionally feed on it."

"Aphids have soft pear-shaped bodies with long legs and antennae and may be green, yellow, brown, red, or black depending on the species and the plants they feed on," UC IPM tells us. "A few species appear waxy or woolly due to the secretion of a waxy white or gray substance over their body surface. Most species have a pair of tubelike structures called cornicles projecting backward out of the hind end of their body. The presence of cornicles distinguishes aphids from all other insects.

"Generally adult aphids are wingless, but most species also occur in winged forms, especially when populations are high or during spring and fall. The ability to produce winged individuals provides the pest with a way to disperse to other plants when the quality of the food source deteriorates."

Not only do aphids stunt plant growth but they can spread viruses. Plus, they produce that sticky honey dew they that attracts ants and other insects.

Density? We've seen aphids so dense on our milkweed stems that all we see is yellow. (Sometimes we see red!)

We recently saw them magnified on a Leica DVM6 microscope, operated by Lynn Epstein, UC Davis emeritus professor of plant pathology, at a demonstration in Hutchison Hall.  (See image below)

In California, most aphids reproduce asexually throughout most of the year, according to UC IPM. Did you know that a single aphid can generate as many as 12 offspring a day--without mating?

Bring on the lady beetles (aka lady bugs), lacewings, and soldier beetles!  The larvae of lady beetles and syrphid flies also do their part in gobbling up aphids.

What to do when biological control doesn't work that well? Or when your lady beetles depart? Pinch the aphids; spray them with with water; or spray them with a mixture of 1 tablespoon of dish soap (Castile liquid soap) and one quart of water. Some folks dab aphids with cotton swabs dipped in isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol but that will kill the monarch eggs and larvae as well. We've found that spraying a mixture of sudsy soap and water works best for us.

Lather is the best medicine.

In case you missed it...we have a winner in the 2018 Beer-for-a-Butterfly Contest, sponsored by Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology.

And the winner is…drumroll…Art Shapiro. Yes, he's won again!

We're not sure how many folks were out searching in the three-county area of Sacramento, Solano and Yolo, but the first butterfly of the year is now history.

Shapiro collected the cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, at 11:23 a.m. Friday, Jan. 19 in one of his frequented sites—a mustard patch by railroad tracks in West Sacramento, Yolo County. He caught it with his hands--no net--no small feat.

Since 1972, the first flight has varied from Jan. 1 to Feb. 22, averaging about Jan. 20. Shapiro acknowledged that he didn't think he'd find it Jan. 19 as the weather forecast included cloudy skies and a chance of rain.

“I spotted the male butterfly dorsal basking (sunbathing) on low vegetation shortly after the first cumulous formed at 11 a.m.,” the professor said. “As I approached to collect it, a small cumulus occluded the sun and it closed its wings over its back--allowing me to just pick it up without using my net at all, and drop it into a glassine envelope. It turned out that that was the ONLY cloud that crossed the sun in the next two and a half hours! It got up to about 60 degrees and was a gorgeous day with a trace of a west wind.”

He described the butterfly as quite yellow instead of white. “Cold weather promotes sepiapterin formation, so early ones are often quite yellow.” 

Apparently the newly emerged butterfly had not yet flown. When Shapiro placed it in the glassine envelope, “it voided meconium, metabolic wastes of metamorphosis, normally ejected before the first flight.”  (Note that in its immature form, the cabbageworm is a pest. See UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) website.)

Shapiro, who maintains a research website at http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu, launched the contest in 1972 as part of his scientific research to record the first flight of the butterfly in the three-county area of Sacramento, Yolo and Solano. He offers a pitcher of the beer, or its equivalent, to the first person who collects the “first of the year” butterfly. It's a contest he usually wins. He has been defeated only four times, and all by UC Davis graduate students.

His former graduate student,  Matt Forester, now a professor of biology at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a research collaborator with Shapiro, accurately predicted the first butterfly would be found on Jan. 19.

This is the seventh year the winning butterfly has been collected in Yolo County. Last year Shapiro found the winner on the UC Davis campus; in 2016, graduate student Jacob Montgomery netted the winner outside his home in west Davis, and Shapiro collected all five winners from 2012 to 2015 in West Sacramento. 

Shapiro mused that the 2018 winner "probably emerged an hour or so before I got there so this really is the start of the season! Let the rites of spring begin!” 

How many days 'til spring? Check out this handy "Days Left to Spring" website for the days, hours and minutes.

How appropriate are many of the common names of insects!

Take the immature form (caterpillar) of the moth, Schizura concinna, family Notodontidae.  We first spotted this caterpillar on our Western redbud tree (Cercis occidentalis) in September 2010.

It has a red hump. The common name: The redhumped caterpillar.

Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis, told us that the red hump contains a defensive formic acid gland. "They hold their anal prolegs, which are not useful for walking, in the air and thrash their rear ends in unison when disturbed. This is the ONLY defoliator of redbud around here, and is very common. It also attacks walnut and a variety of other chemically-distinctive trees that other things don't eat, as a rule."

We wondered if these little thrashing visitors should concern us. "The damage is minor, and I strongly advise against spraying; hand-picking can be used if control is deemed necessary, but they feed so late in the season that there is no actual harm to the tree," he told us. "The moth is very nondescript. It holds its wings wrapped around the body cylindrically and looks remarkably like a cigarette butt, though it is probably 'imitating' a broken-off twig. Despite authoritative commentary to the contrary, they have two broods a year here but are usually seen in fall. The species is native on both coasts and oddly absent in most of the mid-continent."

We thought we might see redhumped caterpillars on our liquidambar (sweet gum) trees that we planted more than two decades ago. We never have.

What we did see this week is that the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) has revised its Pest Notes: Redhumped Caterpillar.  A recent UC IPM blog described the caterpillar as a "familiar pest on fruit and nut trees such as plum, almond, cherry, and apple, as well as on ornamental trees like liquidambar and birch. It can reach high populations in California's Central Valley, sometimes defoliating entire trees."

The Pest Note, co-authored by entomologists Emily Symmes, UC IPM and UC Cooperative Extension, Sacramento Valley, and Steve Dreistadt, UC IPM, describes the pest, its life cycle, and the damage rendered.  You can read about a variety of management techniques.

Ah, the redhumped caterpillar...

And if you're curious about common names and scientific names of insects, the Entomological Society of America (ESA) maintains a Common Name Database, "an essential reference for anyone who works with insects. It includes more than 2,000 common names and is searchable by common name, scientific name, author, order, family, genus, and species."

Have a suggestion for a common name? You can propose it on the ESA form.  Names are reviewed by the Committee on the Common Names of Insects and voted on by the ESA Governing Board.

It's probably unlikely, however, that redhumped caterpillar, will undergo a name change any time soon. That red hump is so descriptive!

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