Hear that buzz? See those bees? Taste that honey? 

When the California Honey Festival takes place Saturday, May 7 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in downtown Woodland, you'll hear the buzz, see the buzz, and sample honey.

The festival, launched in 2017--and by co-founder Amina Harris, director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center at the Robert Mondavi Institute--aims to inspire "people of all ages to protect and celebrate bees and other pollinators." Admission is free.

"UC Davis will have a slimmed down version this year," said Harris. Some of the events on tap Saturday: 

• The UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center will showcase its honey tasting wheel and offer free honey tasting.
• The California Master Beekeeper Program will staff two educational booths. Visitors can examine a bee observation hive, check out the beekeeping equipment and peer through microscopes. Kids' activities are also planned. 
• The Bohart Museum of Entomology of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematolgoy will showcase bee diversity in its specimen drawers. Its live "petting zoo" will include Madagascar hissing cockroaches and stick insects (walking sticks) that folks can hold,  said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator.
• The UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden will address pollinator needs and gardening.
• The Woodland Public Library will offer a children's reading hour.
• Uncle Jer's Traveling Bee Show will provide educational performances.
• The UC Davis Bookstores booth will contain honey, books, and other gifts for sale.
• Visitors can don a bee costume and get their picture taken in the UC Davis Pollination Park, a collaboration with the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. 

Harris said the festival will include live music, a beer and mead garden. Some 100 vendors will sell everything from food to plants to arts and crafts.  The first festival drew some 30,000 visitors.

An after-party is planned at The Hive, part of Z Specialty Food, Woodland. Harris, the "Queen Bee" of Z Specialty Food, said advance registration is required. Access https://zspecialtyfood.com/event/california-honey-festival-after-party/.

If you've recently visited the pollinator gardens at The Hive, a family business owned by Z Specialty Food, 1221 Harter Way, Woodland, you've seen the spectacular Pride of Madeira, Echium candicans.

Now another "pride" awaits.

Z Specialty Food will host a Nature Day celebration, a free public event from 11 a.m., to 5 p.m., Saturday, April 2. 

The 20,000-square-foot facility, which houses the Moon Shine Trading Company, Island of the Moon Apiaries, and The Hive,  includes a processing plant, a tasting room (honey and mead), a gift shop, an outdoor courtyard and a pollinator garden.  As the largest honey varietal business in California, it is the pride of all folks eager to say: "Show me the honey!" 

And now on Saturday, April 2, during the Nature Day celebration, you'll see the pride of The Hive. 

What's on tap for Nature Day?

Don't Toss Those Scraps! – Natural Dye Workshop 
Time: All day
Learn how to utilize food scraps and create one-of-a-kind dyes for clothing, fabric and yarn.  You'll be provided white cloth, avocado pits and black beans. What's with food waste? Each year Americans waste 108 billion pounds of food, contributing to extensive environmental, economic, and societal impacts. 

Miridae Living Labs 
Time: All day
You'll get to play with seed bombs, bugs, and plants with Miridae Living Labs! This is a non-profit, Sacramento-area organization dedicated to using native insects and plants as tools for education, research, and community engagement. The business "strives to generate positive ecological changes in our communities under the guidance and leadership of community members," a spokesperson said.

Miridae Mobile Nursery 
Noon: Container Gardening with California Native Plants (first-come, first-serve basis with purchase of plant) 
Miridae Mobile Nursery is a customized box truck that transforms into a curbside native plant shop. Its goal is "to bring people together through plants and gardening."  All profits from its sales of native plants support its science education, non-profit Miridae Living Labs.

The Hive Nature Loop Scavenger Hunt 
Time: All Day
You can grab a pamphlet and go on a scavenger hunt for plants in The Hive Nature Loop. Find all the plants and show to a team member to win a prize!

Pollinator Garden Tour
Time: 1 p.m.
Join plant curator Rowan Boswell for a tour of the two-acre pollinator gardens at The Hive. It's billed as: "Get inspired by our oasis and outdoor courtyard, designed to meet the needs of our community and native species. Discover pollinator favorites, California natives, and drought-tolerant plants."

Bohart Museum of Entomology
The Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis will display specimens of bees. The insect museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology, is the home of a global collection of eight million insect specimens; a live "petting zoo" (Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects and tarantulas); and a gift shop. 

Photography
Some 24 images of honey bees by award-winning photographer Kathy Keatley Garvey of UC Davis will be showcased. A communication specialist for the Department of Entomology and Nematology who takes images of honey bees and other pollinators in her leisure time, she comes from a long line of beekeepers. She writes a daily (Monday-Friday) Bug Squad blog.

The Hive Facility Tour 
Times: 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
Visitors are invited to tour the four-year development, created to educate the public on honey, bees, and pollination. Nectar director Josh Zeldner will guide the tours of 20,000-square-foot, Zero Net Energy facility.

Z Specialty Food began as the Moon Shine Trading Company, founded in 1979 by Ishai Zeldner (1947-2018), who died at age 71. He worked as a commercial beekeeper and studied beekeeping at UC Davis. He became fond of yellow starthistle honey. "He loved it so much that he began giving it away to his friends, and quickly realized he was going broke doing so," remembers his widow, Amina Harris, the director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center. Her title at the family business? "Queen Bee." Son Josh Zeldner is the "nectar director." Liz Luu is the marketing manager and tasting room manager, or a "worker bee."

Honey enthusiasts all, they and their crew will greet the public on Nature Day, April 2. The bees will be there, too, foraging on the Pride of Madeira.

The recent death of "Ant Man" E. O. Wilson brings back memories of a family-friendly seminar on ants that UC Davis Professor Phil Ward presented Feb. 20, 2021 during the UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day/Month.

Then shortly after Wilson's death, entomologist Doug Tallamy, a University of Delaware professor, published an article in The Conversation that explored Wilson's lifelong passion for ants.

"Wilson, who died Dec. 26, 2021 at the age of 92, discovered the chemical means by which ants communicate," wrote Tallamy. "He worked out the importance of habitat size and position within the landscape in sustaining animal populations. And he was the first to understand the evolutionary basis of both animal and human societies."

"Each of his seminal contributions fundamentally changed the way scientists approached these disciplines, and explained why E.O.--as he was fondly known--was an academic god for many young scientists like me," Tallamy continued. "This astonishing record of achievement may have been due to his phenomenal ability to piece together new ideas using information garnered from disparate fields of study."

"Though I am an entomologist," Tallamy wrote, "I did not realize that insects were “the little things that run the world” until Wilson explained why this is so in 1987. Like nearly all scientists and nonscientists alike, my understanding of how biodiversity sustains humans was embarrassingly cursory. Fortunately, Wilson opened our eyes."

Last weekend I noticed some "little things that run the world" when I ventured out in the backyard to set out a spoonful of honey (not to "let the medicine go down" but to see ants come up). 

What arrived: Argentine ants, as identified by Phil Ward.

Argentine ants are pests, says Ward, known globally for his expertise on ant systematics. These invaders from South America "form super colonies, which means different colonies don't fight each other; they're all cooperating," he told the UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day/Month viewers. "And the other downside of Argentine ants is that they tend to eliminate native ants. So over the years I've lived in Davis, I have certainly noticed that native ants have declined as the Argentine ants have expanded. And they expand not just in, say, urban areas, but along certain natural habitats and one that they really like is the riparian habitat. So if you look along rivers and streams that are near urban areas, they're getting invaded by Argentine ants.  And when they do, most native ants just disappear.  This is a very tough aggressive ant and the mellow California ants can't handle an aggressive invader from South America. So they just disappear."

In his hour-long UC Davis presentation, Ward answered scores of questions, drawing viewers from as far away as Virginia.  He illustrated his talk with ant images taken his former doctoral student Alex Wild (PhD from UC Davis in 2005), curator of entomology at the University of Texas, Austin, and a noted macro photographer (http://www.alexanderwild.com).

Ants, Ward said, live in long-lived colonies with (1) cooperative brood care (2) overlapping generations and (3) reproductive division of labor, the hall marks of eusocial behavior. He also pointed out:

• A typical ant colony contains a reproductive queen, numerous non-reproductive workers and brood (eggs, larvae, pupae)
• Colonies of ants can be thought of as superorganisms: tightly integrated and cooperative entities with complex systems of communication and division of labor (castes)

Ants originated about 120 million years ago (early Cretaceous), evolving from "wasp-like creatures," Ward said. They are members of the order Hymenoptera, and their closest relatives include honey bees, cockroach wasp and the mud daubers.

California has some 300 species of ants, Ward related, but thousands more are in the tropics, like Costa Rico. Globally, there may be as many as 40,000 to 50,000 species of ants, the professor estimated, but only about 14,000 are described.

"Ants have occupied almost all of the world's land surfaces, from deserts to rain forests," Ward said. "There's a few places they're absent. They're not in Antarctica, no surprise! They haven't colonized the Arctic and a few very high elevation tropical mountains, but apart from that, almost any place you go on land you'll see our friends, the ants. And they have assumed a quite a diverse array of ecological roles. Some of them are predators, others are scavengers, and some are seed collectors, and these habits vary tremendously among different species in different parts of the world."

Ants communicate largely by chemical (pheromones) and tactile means, Ward said, adding that their vision is "not particularly acute." He pointed out that that they lay a trail pheromones from the source of food back to the nest. They have alarm pheromones, causing other workers to act defensively. Chemicals also help ants distinguish their nest mates.

Ward's presentation, "All About Ants II," is posted on YouTube at https://youtu.be/d8eRNsD8dxo. You'll want to see why the UC Davis myrmecologist calls "My friends, the ants." 

As for my little venture into "the ant world," I learned they are quite fascinating, but also quite difficult to photograph. They are indeed "the little things that run the world" and the emphasis should be on "run."

Even with a belly full of honey. 

You may associate “tasting room” with wine in the Napa Valley, or olive oil in Fairfield, but now there's a tasting room in Woodland to sample honey and mead (honey wine). 

That's Z Specialty Food's newly constructed The HIVE, located at 1221 Harter Ave. Woodland. It's 42 years in the making, including four years of design and construction, said self-described "Queen Bee" Amina Harris of the family-owned business.

A grand opening public celebration, featuring live bands, plant tours, family activities, and honey and mead sales,  as well as food available from the HIVE and local food trucks,  will take place Saturday, Nov. 13 from 1 to 7 p.m., and Sunday, Nov. 14 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. 

Z Specialty Food, home of the Island of the Moon Apiaries, the Moon Shine Trading Company, and The HIVE, specializes in 30-plus honey varietals, including Mexican coffee golden reserve varietal honey, Northwestern blackberry gourmet  varietal honey,  Florida white tupelo honey, and California spring wildflower honey.  Another favorite: starthistle honey, favored by many beekeepers.

“I am passionate about introducing people to taking the time to taste honey properly, noticing every unique color, flavor, aroma and texture that comes through,” Harris said.

Inside the 20,000-square-foot, Zero Net Energy facility is an  "upscale wine tasting room, with a rustic wood rustic-clad bar where visitors stand while an employee behind the bar offers honey samples on tiny plastic spoons," according to an article in Sacramento Magazine. "Each honey is surprisingly unique, with its own distinct color, aroma and flavor profile."

Harris, who serves as the director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center at the Robert Mondavi Institute, said her  husband, the late Ishai "Charles" Zeldner, founded Z Specialty Food in 1979. A  fourth-generation food merchant who worked with a beekeeping operation in Israel while living in the kibbutz, Beit HaShita, he later studied apiculture at UC Davis. He died June 17, 2018 at his home in Davis at age 71.  

"Our late founder, Ishai Zeldner, always wanted a place to host people from all over the world, and blow their minds around the vast array of flavors, colors and textures of varietal honey," the website relates. "Now you can experience the fruits of our labor, from a family business that has been through it all over the last 42 years, and counting."

Son Joshua Zeldner, nectar director of Z Specialty Food, commented about the grand opening celebration: "It's hard to believe we are finally here, a true dream come true..." His dad, he said, "always wanted to have a ‘honey museum' on I-5, and now we do. I am so excited to invite people to experience what we have created, the full circle of plants, bees, honey and mead."

The site includes a courtyard and a pollinator garden.