- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
So there you are, admiring your Coreopsis and suddenly you notice spots and holes--spots on the backs of two western spotted cucumber beetles, and holes cut in the petals.
Ah, there's two of them.
The beetles, about a fourth of an inch long, are fun to photograph, but they're not your buddies. Nor would they want to be!
"Cucumber beetles are very common pests in vegetable gardens and may also attack ripening stone fruit," says the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program. "The most abundant species in California is the western spotted cucumber beetle, Diabrotica undecimpunctata...The western spotted cucumber beetle is greenish yellow and has twelve black spots on its back."
Ever counted the spots? Yes, 12.
We've seen the beetles feeding on the leaves of flowers and many vegetables. "Cucumber beetles may also spread cucumber mosaic virus or wilts in cucurbits," UC IPM says. "Larvae feed exclusively on roots, but do not generally damage garden plants, although corn may occasionally be damaged."
Spotted cucumber beetles don't move very fast early in the morning, so they're fairly easy to photograph.
And sometimes you get a "two-fer," two in the same image. 24 spots.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Get ready...it's happening...the annual World Bee Day...
Monday, May 20 is World Bee Day, as declared by the United Nations "to raise awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face, and their contribution to sustainable development."
"The goal is to strengthen measures aimed at protecting bees and other pollinators, which would significantly contribute to solving problems related to the global food supply and eliminate hunger in developing countries," the website points out. "We all depend on pollinators and it is, therefore, crucial to monitor their decline and halt the loss of biodiversity."
Lately we've been noticing multiple species of bumble bees in our pollinator garden in Vacaville. One of them appears to be Bombus bifarius.
The bumbles we've seen over the years in our pollinator garden--B. californicus, B. melanopygus, B.vosnesenskii and B. bifarius--especially like Coreopsis, a genus of flowering plants in the aster family, Asteraceae. It's also called tickseed.
Now that's not a good name for such a showy flower!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Just a day in the life of a native bee on a native flower in native California.
Svastra obliqua expurgata, also called "the sunflower bee," absolutely loves Coreoposis californica, sometimes called tickseed.
If you were a plant, would you want to be called "tickseed?"
Probably not. But the name, "tickseed," is apparently derived from the Greek "koris," meaning bed bug, and "opsis," referring to a seed, or resemblance to a seed.
We prefer to call it "Coreopsis."
If you grow Coreopsis, forget about ticks and seeds and think about the bees.
Here's a female foraging on what looks like a pot of gold to us...
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Could it be--a bee?
Yes, that's the metallic green sweat bee, also called an ultra green sweat bee, Agapostemon texanus. This one (below) is a female. Males and females are easily distinguishable. The female is all green, from head to thorax to abdomen, while the male (right) is green on the head and thorax but not on the abdomen.
Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, talked about them at the recent UC Davis Pollinator Gardening Workshop, sponsored by the California Center for Urban Horticulture.
The Agapostemon are members of the Halictinae family. They are "often called sweat bees because in hot weather they are attracted to human perspiration, which they lap up, probably for the salt it contains," according to the book, Bees of the World, by Christopher O'Toole and Christopher Raw.
Some of the family's many genera, including Agapostemon, are restricted to the New World. Halictus and Lasioglossum "are common to the Old and New Worlds," the authors write.
Coreopsis, also called tickseed or coreopsis, is a genus of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae.
We spotted the female metallic green sweat bee at the Loch Lomond Marina, San Rafael. We captured the image of the male several years ago on a seaside daisy at the Mostly Natives Nursery, Tomales.
Green sweat bees will be among the bees featured in the book, "California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists," to be published in the fall of 2014 by Heyday Press. It's the work of Gordon Frankie of UC Berkeley; Robbin Thorp of UC Davis; photographer Rollin Coville of the Bay Area; and Barbara Ertter of UC Berkeley. It will contain nearly 30 of the most common bee genera in California.
Frankie, Thorp, Coville and Ertter (and others) also published "Native Bees Are a Rich Natural Resource in Urban California Gardens" in California Agriculture.