Call it “The Battle Over a Tree Hollow."

Feral bees have occupied—and abandoned—a sycamore tree cavity in a Vacaville neighborhood for at least two decades. They occupy it in the spring, summer and fall, and then the colony either absconds or dies back in the winter. 

When this winter proved exceptionally cold and rainy, a clever squirrel moved in. 

A place to stay warm. A perfect sleepy hollow.

Then in early April, scout bees from a spring swarm begin circling the tree. Wait! There's an intruder inside.

Squirrel: "Occupied! No vacancy!"

Bees: "Out, it's ours!” 

Squirrel: “Finders, keepers! I was here first!” 

Bees: “But it's ours! This is our bee tree!”

Cars speed by.  Residents trudge by with leashed dogs. Birds chirp. A hound bays uproariously.  The sleepy squirrel pokes his head out occasionally as if to ask “What's all the ruckus about? Can't a squirrel get some sleep?” 

More bees buzz around his head.

“Occupied!” Mr. Squirrel shouts again. “No vacancy!” 

The score: Squirrel: 1. Bees: 0.

Then one mid-April day, the tenant vanishes. 

The bees quickly move in. Call it a "hollow victory" for the bees.

The score: Bees: 1. Squirrel, O.

Now a queen bee is busily laying eggs. The workers are performing their age-related duties: nurse maids, nannies, royal attendants, builders, architects, foragers, dancers, honey tenders, pollen packers, propolis or "glue" specialists, air conditioning and heating technicians, undertakers, and guards.

Who was it who said "Everything works if you let it?" The American rock band, Cheap Trick. 

So true.

Have you seen any Checkered White butterflies lately?

They're quite common in the southern United States and northern Mexico (they're known as the Southern cabbage butterfly), but one CW fluttered through our pollinator garden in Vacaville, Solano County, Calif., on June 23.

It's in the same family, Pieridae, as the cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae.

This one, a female Pontia protodice, as identified by butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, seemed to like our lavender.

"There was one laying eggs at Gates Canyon (Vacaville) two weeks ago," Shapiro noted. "This is an immigrant, which occasionally overwinters here--not very recently, though. It lives in the desert, both in SoCal and in Nevada. I don't know which direction these are coming from."

He reported two recently at Lang Crossing (Nevada County) on the Sierran West slope at 5000 feet. "This is probably a significant incursion."

He saw "scads of them" on June 30 in Rancho Cordova (Sacramento County)--clearly breeding there!"

The Checkered Whites "tend to fly in a straighter line than rapae, like it's late for an important date," he quipped. The females have more extensive markings than the males.

On his website, Art's Butterfly World, he points out that:

"In the 1970s this species was often abundant at low elevation along the transect, overwintering only locally and sporadically-mostly on dredge tailings along the American River. It has since become much rarer and in most years is seen only in September and October. At Sierra Valley it overwinters unpredictably but colonizes each year from the desert in May or June, and usually becomes common by late summer. It has been recorded at all sites but is not a permanent resident at any of them at this time!"

"A highly vagile species, the Checkered White breeds on a great variety of Brassicaceous plants, preferring smaller and unsucculent species such as Peppergrasses (Lepidium, but L. latifolium is unpreferred), Tumble Mustard (Sisymbrium altissimum), and the short-lived perennial Hirschfeldia incana (formerly called Brassica geniculata). The eggs are orange, laid conspicuously near the top of the plant, and the larvae, which are striped lengthwise in whitish yellow and greenish gray, feed primarily on buds, flowers and fruit. However, eggs are also often laid on small rosettes, especially if the larger plants in the area are senescent. This is overwhelmingly a species of grassland and steppe and occurs in wooded areas only along roadsides."

Shapiro, who has been monitoring the butterfly population of central California since 1972, says the Checkered White adults visit mustards, composites, legumes "and almost anything else; they are often abundant in irrigated alfalfa and visit its flowers freely. Males patrol in host-plant areas and often mate with teneral females."

No doubt you've seen a praying mantis egg case, or ootheca, on a tree, shrub, fence or post.

But have you ever seen one attached to a clothespin on an outdoor clothes line?

So here we were Thursday afternoon, hanging freshly laundered dog blankets on the clothes line. 

We grabbed one clothespin after another, carefully fastening Fido's favorite blankets to the line to dry in the 80-degree temperature. 

One more reach....Whoa! What's that?

Can't use that one. There's a ooth on it.

A praying mantis, Stagmomantis limbata, had apparently pinned her hopes to a clothespin. Or maybe that was her PIN number?

"Too funny," commented Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and a UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology. "What a weird place to put your ooth."

Our little gravid gal must have climbed the eight-foot-high clothes pole last fall; walked the line (ala Johnny Cash?); and discovered the "perfect place" to deposit her ooth--right above a patch of Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifola) buzzing with bees and fluttering with butterflies. 

"I've seen egg cases on outdoor furniture, predator guards on duck boxes, on buildings between bricks, trees, and even garden implements like pots, watering cans, and tools," said praying mantis expert Andrew Pfeifer, who now studies horticulture/landscape design at North Carolina University. "It's a Stagmomantis limbata ooth for sure; the hatch rate will be 150 or less."

Oothecas don't usually hatch until around June,  but with the temperatures soaring here in Vacaville, it could happen  "even within the month," Pfeifer says. 

In September 2018, we watched a praying mantis deposit her ooth a few feet from that clothesline.  That gal chose a redwood stake. (See photos on Bug Squad blog). 

Now we wait for the nymphs to emerge...and scramble to eat one another...and prey on bees and butterflies...and the life cycle begins.

Gates Canyon, located just outside the city of Vacaville,  in Solano County, Calif., is quite the ecosystem.

• It's one of the habitats of the California state insect, the California dogface butterfly, Zerene eurydice, and its host plant, false indigo, Amorpha californica--or at least it was before massive wildfire swept through there on Aug. 19, 2020. 
  
  
• It's one of 10 research sites of butterfly guru Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, who has monitored central California's butterfly populations since 1972 and maintains a research website at https://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/

And now, it's the home of a newly discovered ant species. 

Myrmecologists Brendon Boudinot, Marek Borowiec and Matthew Prebus, all alumni of the Phil Ward laboratory, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, just published their collaborative research,   "Phylogeny, Evolution, and Classification of the Ant Genus Lasius, the Tribe Lasiini and the Subfamily Formicinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)," in the journal Systemic Entomology.

The ant world on Twitter is crawling with congratulatory comments and how "awesome" the work is.  Wrote one:  "Congratulations! Lasius is a familiar genus in Japan, so I will let the Japanese entomologists know about it."

The story behind the story? It all began in the Ward lab. "The Three Ant Men" are now scattered from Idaho to Arizona to Germany.

• Borowiec, who received his doctorate at UC Davis in 2016, is an assistant professor at the University of Idaho.
• Prebus, who received his doctorate at UC Davis in 2018, is a postdoctoral scholar at Arizona State University. 
• Boudinot, who received his doctorate at UC Davis in 2020, is in Jena, Germany on a two-year Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship to research evolutionary and comparative anatomy.

Boudinot says "this work was eight years in the making—trials and tribulations were the order of the decade." The study began with a challenge. "Phil told us of a population of highly unusual species of Lasius from Gates Canyon Canyon near Vacaville, L. atopus, and wondered if we would be able to find a colony. The three of us drove to Gates Canyon on March 22, 2014 and spent several hours flipping rocks and digging in this steep-sided and poison-oak-filled ravine until we found one! We proceeded to hack our way through the poison oak roots to collect as many specimens as possible.

Said Boudinot: "With these strange, elongate Lasius in hand and under the microscope, we realized that the population likely represents a new and closely related species, but we held off on describing the species, instead choosing to focus on the hypothesis that L. atopus belonged to the Chthonolasius subgenus, as postulated in 1958 by Art Cole. Under Marek's leadership, we proceeded to sequence this population of L. atopus, along with eleven other carefully chosen species from the genus for phylogenetic analysis, and we presented our results at the 2014 Entomological Society of America meeting in Portland Oregon. Specifically, we found that L. atopus does not belong in Chthonolasius, and on top of that the nominotypical subgenus, Lasius (Lasius) was polyphyletic, that is, an unnatural grouping that excludes some daughter lineages while also including distantly related species."

In addition to presenting their results at the ESA meeting, they submitted their study as a manuscript to Systematic Entomology, "which is when we experienced an acute episode of tribulation as our work was rejected for being too preliminary, despite our diverse taxon sampling and incisive molecular dataset," Boudinot recalled. "Undaunted, we expanded our taxon sampling, this time sequencing several species collected by other colleagues, including Marek's father. To our tremendous surprise, we discovered that one of these newly sequenced taxa, the recently described Grecian species Lasius myrmidon was, in fact, not a Lasius at all! Rather, this species turns out to be an ancient and isolated relictual lineage, sister to the mightily diverse Prenolepis genus group, which itself is the closest relative of the Lasius genus group. After many starts and stops, the project lay dormant as Marek and Matt completed their dissertations, and I focused on getting mine into shape.'

Looking back, Prebus and Borowiec said that they were both interested in Lasius atopus "due to its strange morphology and lack of phylogenetic data despite the amount of attention paid to the genus, and planned a collecting trip to the type locality in Mendocino County in 2013."

The collecting trip to Mendocino proved unsuccessful. "But because of Phil's extensive collections. we knew of a population of a closely related species in Gates Canyon near the city of Vacaville," Prebus said. This time the trio collected specimens from several colonies at Gates Canyon, which is located off Pleasants Valley Road.

"For all of us, this was a collaborative side project, so after the study was presented, submitted, and rejected, it took the back-burner while people finished their dissertations, got jobs, got married, had kids, and so on," Prebus recalled. "Speaking personally, the pandemic put quite a few of my postdoc projects on hold after the Arizona State University campus closed, but the small upside amongst the inundation of downsides was that I was able to focus on getting some long-haul projects into shape for publication, including the Lasius study. This involved a huge amount of reanalysis of data that we had already collected, but thankfully didn't require generating any new data."

See more on the ant research on the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology website.

(Note that the 7.8 mile Gates Canyon Road, lined with residential homes (private property) and "no trespassing" signs, is a paved county road that leads to the top of Mount Summit, the highest point in Vacaville. It is narrow and hilly. Hikers, runners, walkers and bicylists consider it a challenge.)