A monarch butterfly takes flight, lifting off from a Mexican sunflower, Tithonia. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

Early in his career, the late heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali (1942-2016) drew international headlines  when he uttered that remark before his 1964 fight with then champion Sonny Liston.

It was all over by the seventh round when "The Greatest" emerged victorious. But his comment regarding butterfly and bee behavior lives on.

Would an entomologist say "Float like Lepidoptera, Sting Like Hymenoptera?"

That begs the question--were any bug people ever champion boxers?  

Yes, the late James H. Oliver Jr. (1931-2018) was a Golden Gloves champion.

Two years before Oliver died,  entomologist Marlin Rice, a past president of the Entomological Society of America, interviewed him for American Entomologist (Volume 62, Issue 4, Winter 2016), pointing out: "James H. Oliver, Jr. is Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Biology Emeritus at Georgia Southern University and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Oliver is widely recognized as an international expert in medical entomology and acarology, especially the biology and cytogenetics of pathogen-transmitting ticks and parasitic mites."

And Oliver was a Golden Gloves state champion.

Rice asked him a series of questions, including:

"Were you a good student?"

Oliver: "No, not very. I was a good school athlete and party guy. [Laughs.]

You went into boxing at the University of Georgia? Were you a good boxer?

Oliver: "Yeah. I won the state championship in my weight—the Golden Gloves."

Did you ever get knocked out boxing?

Oliver: "No."

Did you ever knock out an opponent?

Oliver: Yeah. [Laughs.]

What's the quickest round you ever won?

Oliver: "Probably second or third round. I was so good at it because I was in good physical condition—great physical condition. I had a coach that said the one's that's in the best physical condition and can keep his left jab going all the time and don't try for a knockout—just hammer him [would win]. It was very good advice, because after the second round my opponent would usually get arm weary and I'd block him by keeping my hands up. That's how I won most of my fights, out of pure physical condition, and I was coordinated and fast. So then I found what I wanted to do; I'm not going to be a veterinarian, I'm going to be a boxer—a professional boxer! Well, that wasn't well thought out. [Laughs.] My brother, and he was always a scholar, said, “My god, you can't do that. You're going to have a brain concussion!” “Yeah, but I'm quick.” I was finally talked into not doing that and leaving the University of Georgia. I went to Georgia Southern 'cause it was only 50 miles away from home and I liked teaching as well. So I'll become a high school biology teacher and coach. That was my goal for several years until I decided I don't want to do that." (Read the entire interview here.)

So, yes, at least one entomologist was a boxing champion. Another professional boxer went into pest control following his retirement.  Mike "Irish Mike" Jameson fought the likes of Mike Tyson, George Foreman, Evander Holyfield and  Randall “Tex” Cobbs  before fighting bugs, landing a job as a pest control inspector with Clark Pest Control, Lodi, Calif., according to a feature story on pctonline.com.)

Did they ever say "Float like Lepidoptera,  sting like Hymenoptera?"

Well, maybe they said "flutter" instead of "float?"   

It's early morning and the spider is hungry. 

It snares a honey bee foraging for pollen and nectar in a patch of Mexican sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifola) in a Vacaville pollinator garden. 

The spider slides down the sticky web, kills its prey with a venomous bite, and begins to eat.

The spider is not alone. It soon has unexpected dining partners: tiny freeloader flies (family Milichiidae) who did no work but insist on their share of the free food. 

Indeed, orbweavers are artists. Wrote Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) in her poem, "The Spider as an Artist":

The spider as an artist
Has never been employed
Though his surpassing merit
Is freely certified.

Today was a good day for an unemployed artist, freely certified, too--and a good day for the freeloaders, certified hungry.

Emily Dickinson? She wrote many poems with references to such arthropods as bees, spiders, butterflies, flies and gnats,

Emily Dickinson's Arthropods

Nothing says National Pollinator Week more than a honey bee coated in pollen.

Make mine yellow. Yellow pollen.

There's plenty of time to prepare. National Pollinator Week is June 21-27.

You can register your activities--make that "socially distant activities" to the official Pollinator Week events map.

You can request local buildings to light up yellow and orange in support of pollinators.

You can sign and mail proclamations to your governor in support of Pollination Week.

And, you can celebrate the week by taking an image of a pollinator.

We ventured over to the UC Davis Ecological Garden, Student Farm, Agricultural Sustainability Institute, to capture these two images of a honey bee blanketed with pollen as she foraged--appropriately--on a blanket flower, Gaillardia. The plant is a member of the sunflower family, Asteraeae, and native to North and South America. 

The Pollinator Partnership, which sponsors National Pollinator Week, points out that about 75 percent of all flowering plant species "need the help of animals to move their heavy pollen grains from plant to plant for fertilization."

PP also relates that:

• About 1000 of all pollinators are vertebrates such as birds, bats and small animals. 
• Most pollinators (abut 200,000 species) are beneficial insects such as flies, beetles, wasps, ants, butterflies, moths and bees.
• Pollinators are often keystone species, meaning that they are critical to an ecosystem.

Are you ready for National Pollinator Week?

If a queen bee were to celebrate Mother's Day (and she won't because she's too busy laying eggs), what a crowded festivity that would be. 

Bee breeder-geneticist Susan Cobey of Washington State University, former manager of the Harry H.Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis, describes the queen as an "egg-laying machine."

"She's the mother of all the bees in the hive," saysCobey, who studied at UC Davis with Harry Hyde Laidlaw Jr., (1907-2003),  "the father of honey bee genetics."  During the peak season, the queen can lay up to 2000 eggs a day. That amounts to about 50,000 to 80,000 workers (sterile females) and 1000 to 2000 drones (males) in the hive. 

On her maiden flight, the queen bee mates with some 12 to 25 drones in mid-air and then she heads back to the hive to lay eggs for the rest of her life, says Cobey, internationally renowned for her Carniolan bees and classes on instrumental insemination and bee breeding (stock improvement). 

Yes, every bee in the hive has the same mother.  Not so with the fathers.

In his book, The Honey Bee Hobbyist, the Care and Keeping of Bees, Norman "Norm" Gary, UC Davis emeritus professor of apiculture, writes: "All bees in a colony develop from eggs laid by the queen, so they all share the same mother. All bees in a colony develop from eggs laid by the queen, so they all share the same mother. But as a population, they typically have around 15 fathers."

As Gary points out: "The queen bee has no control over the drones that inseminate her. (The virgin queen) mates while flying, never inside the hive." 

It's a matriarchal society. The girls (worker bees) do all the work; they serve as nurse maids, nannies, royal attendants, builders, architects, foragers, dancers, honey tenders, pollen packers, propolis or "glue" specialists, air conditioning and heating technicians, guards, and undertakers. So their abbreviated life (during the summer the life span of a worker bee is only four to six weeks) is not surprising. The drones, or males, serve only a reproductive function. Once they they mate, they die.

Honey bee geneticist Robert E. Page Jr., distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis (and emeritus provost, Arizona State University) studied with Laidlaw for his doctorate at UC Davis. He pays tribute to Laidlaw  in his book,  The Art of the Bee: Shaping the Environment from Landscapes to Societies.

In Chapter Nine, "The Song of the Queen," Page reprinted a poem by E. B. White (Dec. 15, The New Yorker) objecting to instrumental insemination. White opined in the poem that the queen bee should "mate with whatever drone" she encounters. 

Page reprinted Laidlaw's response, published in the San Francisco Chronicle, which said in part:

Her offspring slave throughout the day,
They feed her children as best they may
They would like to see a moment
Directed toward stock improvement. 

If you're interested in bees and beekeeping, or just curious about these amazing superorganisms, these books read well on Mother's Day...and any other day.