- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
You can learn more about native bee and their importance when pollination ecologist Neal Williams, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and a 2015-2020 Chancellor's Fellow, present a talk on "Pollination, the Importance of Native Bees and How to Promote Them" at the California Honey Festival on Saturday, May 6.
The annual event, free and family friendly, takes place from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., in downtown Woodland.
"Pollination by insects, mostly bees, is critical to human wellbeing," Professor Williams said. "An astonishing 75 percent of food crops benefit to some extent from pollination, most of it provided by managed and wild bees. When thinking about pollination of crops, most of us consider honey bees–and they are a critical part of crop pollination. However, native bees also play an important role and in some cases are better pollinators of crops than honey bees. In the presentation, I will provide an overview of the diversity, life history and biology of native bees. I will then discuss how we can use an understanding of bee biology to help sustain and promote diverse communities of wild bees."
Williams' research interests include pollination ecology, bee biology with emphasis on foraging behavior, ecology and evolution of trophic specialization and plant-pollinator interactions, landscape change and community dynamics, ecosystem services and conservation
The California Honey Festival, launched in 2017 to celebrate the importance of bees and to promote honey and honey bees and their products, last year drew a crowd of 40,000.
Amina Harris, director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, Robert Mondavi Institute, and a co-founder of the festival, announced the list of speakers who will deliver 20 to 30-minute talks on the UC Davis Speakers' Stage, located just west of First Street.
10:30 a.m.: Pollination ecologist and professor Neal Williams, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, who will discuss "Pollination, the Importance of Native Bees and How to Promote Them"
11 a.m.: Kitty Bolte, GATEways horticulturist, UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, "Planting Your Garden to be a Welcoming Space for Pollinators"
12 noon: Amina Harris, director of the UC Davis Honey and Pollination Center, and co-owner of Z Food Specialty and The HIVE, Woodland, "Let's Learn to Taste Honey."
1 p.m.: Wendy Mather, co-program manager of the California Master Beekeeper Program (CAMPB), "So, You Want to Be a Beekeeper?"
1:30 p.m.: Jean-Philippe Marelli, senior director of Integrated Pest Management for Mars Wrigley Confectionery (also a journey level master beekeeper and Melipona beekeeper in Brazil), "Stingless Bees: The Amazing World of Melipona Bees"
2 p.m.: Cooperative Extension apiculturist/associate professor Elina Lastro Niño of Entomology and Nematology, and director of the California Master Beekeeper Program (CAMPB), "What Our Bee Research Is Teaching Us."
2:30 p.m.: Sanmu "Samtso" Caoji, a 2022-23 Hubert Humphrey fellow, and founder of the Shangri-la Gyalthang Academy, and CEO of the Cultural Information Consulting Company, "Empowering Women to Become Beekeepers and Bread Winners for Their Families While Keeping Bees in the Wild"
3 p.m.: Rachel Davis, coordinator of Bee City USA Woodland and chair of Bee Campus USA UC Davis (GATEways Horticulturist for the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden), "Woodland Is a Bee City; UC Davis Is a Bee City--What This Means to Our Communities"
UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology communications specialist Kathy Keatley Garvey will provide a background slide show of honey bees and native bees.
The event is both educational and entertaining. Attendees can taste honey, check out the bee observation hives, watch cooking demonstrations and kids' shows, taste mead and other alcoholic drinks (if of age) and learn about bees from beekeepers and bee scientists. Vendors, offering various products and food, will line the streets.
The UC Davis-based California Master Beekeeper Program, founded in 2016 by Niño, provides a program of learning, teaching, research, and public service. They offer comprehensive, science-based information about honey bees and honey bee health. Since 2016, the organization has donated 32,000 hours of volunteer time and served 186,630 individuals in education, outreach and beekeeping mentorship. Read more about their classes and their work on their website.
An after-party will be held from 5 to 9 p.m. at The HIVE Tasting Room and Kitchen, 1221 Harter Ave., Woodland. It will feature pollinator-inspired food, drinks, and dancing to the music of Joy and Madness, an 8-piece soul and funk group. Tickets are $20 and will benefit the California Master Beekeeper Program. "Each ticket includes entry to win a bountiful Yolo County food and drink basket (value $500)," Harris said. More information is on this website.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Urban entomologist Gordon Frankie, professor emeritus and research entomologist in the Department of Environmental Sciences, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley, will be one of the speakers. He specializes in behavioral ecology of solitary bees in wildland and urban environments and co-authored the celebrated book, California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists: (Heyday Books, 2014) by UC scientists, including the late Robbin Thorp, UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology. The book is available online from UC Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR).
The Event: Bee Bash
Date: Saturday, April 1
Time: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Place: Annie's Annuals and Perennials, 740 Market Ave, Richmond, Calif.
Cost: Free
This is Annie's Annuals' first-ever Bee Bash. Earlier the plant nursery hosted spectacular butterfly summits. Butterfly guru Art Shapiro, distinguished professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, keynoted the 2018 summit. (Read his remarks on Bug Squad)
The schedule of events:
10 a.m.: Jennifer Jewell: “Invitations From and To the Garden: Cultivating Places & People”
11 a.m.: John Whittlesey: “Bumble Bees--Their Natural History & Designing Gardens to Support Them”
12:30: Tora Rocha and Angela Laws: “Maintaining Native Bee Habitats”
1:30 p.m.: Gordon Frankie: “Characteristics of Pollinator Habitat Gardens”
About the speakers:
Jewell hosts the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast, "Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden." She's authored several book, including The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press in 2020); Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, May 2021); and What We Sow, to be published later this year by Timber Press.
Whittlesey is a nurseryman, garden designer, and author of The Plant Lovers Guide to Salvias, published by Timber Press in 2014.
Rocha is the founder and leader of the Pollinator Posse, a volunteer group based in Oakland that creates “pollinator corridors” in and around the Bay Area. (Check out the Pollinator Posse Facebook page.)
Laws, a community ecologist, holds the title of Endangered Species Conservation Biologist, Xerces Society of Invertebrate Conservation.
California Bees and Blooms is the work of Frankie, Thorp, Barbara Ertter of UC Berkeley, and Rollin Coville, a UC Berkeley doctoral alumnus and photographer. Thorp, 1933-2019 (see tribute) also co-authored Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide (Princeton University, 2014).
Want a card set of California's common bees to help you identify them and learn more about them? The newly published (second edition) card set, "Common Bees in California," is available on the UC ANR catalog. From the website: "Nearly 1600 species of native bees can be found in California's rich ecosystems; this colorful pocket field guide will help you identify bees commonly found in urban gardens and landscapes." Frankie is one of the co-authors.
Resource:
Native Bees Are a Rich Natural Resource in Urban California Gardens (California Agriculture, Volume 63, Number 3)
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Honey bees and native bees love capeweed, Arctotheca calendula, also called South African capeweed, cape dandelion and cape marigold or cape gold.
It's an invasive plant originating from the Cape Province in South Africa (Here's what the California Invasive Council says about it:
"Capeweed (Arctotheca calendula) is an annual or perennial evergreen herb that, when young, forms a low-growing rosette of heavily pinnately lobed leaves, with undersides covered by woolly down. With age, it forms an extensive, dense, mat-like groundcover by proliferation of rooting stems (stolons) from rosettes. Leaves are pinnately lobed; fine, dense hairs cause stems and leaves to appear silvery. Flowers are approximately two inches in diameter, lemon yellow, and daisy-like with yellow centers. The plant is conspicuous in late spring and early summer due to its increase in size and the profusion of large yellow daisies. Plants are seldom solitary, and they spread vigorously by creeping stems (Lasca Leaves 1968)."
Capeweed may have arrived in California in a shipment of grass seed from Australia, where it is a common weed, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The invasive species compendium (CABI) listed it as a noxious weed in 2010 in California.
However, it's cultivated as an ornamental ground cover and has both "fertile" and "sterile" forms.
We've seen lawnmowers run over the the weed in City of Benicia parks (yes, it grows back), we've seen it thriving in a gold carpet along coastal California, and we've seen bees foraging on it.
It's a pollinator paradise, of sorts, but it's also invasive.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/92038151658. (Contact Page at mpage@ucdavis.edu for the ID number and passcode.)
Page studies with major professor and pollination ecologist Neal Williams of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. Her work suggests that honey bees reduce pollen and nectar availability in flowers, leading to competitive displacement of native bees.
"Competitive displacement of native bees may in turn decrease plant pollination because native bees are often more effective than native bees as pollinators," Page says. "My research suggests that such changes are already occurring for Camassia quamash (small camas) following honey bee introductions in the Sierra Nevada."
Page is scheduled to receive her doctorate in entomology in June 2022 and then begin a postdoctoral fellowship with assistant professor Scott McArt at Cornell University, where she will investigate patterns of interspecific pathogen transmission and how more sustainable beekeeping practices might mitigate the negative effects of competition. McArt recently delivered a seminar hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology on "Pesticide Risk to Pollinators: What We Know and What We Need to Know Better."
In July 2019, Page collaborated with colleagues at Cornell and the University of Minnesota to present a workshop on the intersections of science and social justice, aiming to make science more open and accessible.
Page holds a master's degree in entomology (2019) from UC Davis and a bachelor's degree in biology (2016), cum laude, from Scripps College, Claremont, Calif.
Highly recognized for her work, Page received a three-year $115,000 National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, funded by the Department of Defense. She was one of 69 recipients out of more than 3600 applicants. She earlier won a campuswide 2016-17 Graduate Scholars Fellowship of $25,200; a Vansell Scholarship in both 2018 and 2019; and Davis Society Botanical grants in 2017, 2018 and 2019. A 2018 Duffey-Dingle Research Fellowship also helped fund her research (optimizing pollinator plant mixes to simultaneously support wild and managed bees).
Active in the Entomological Society of America and the Ecological Society of America, Page scored a second-place award for her project, "Optimizing Wildflower Plant Mixes to Support Wild and Managed Bees" in a 2021 student competition hosted by the Entomological Society of America. She also presented “Impacts of Honey Bee Introductions on the Pollination of a Sierra Wildflower" at the August 2020 meeting of the Ecological Society of America, and "Can Visitation and Pollen Transport Patterns Predict Plant Pollination?" at the April 2019 meeting of the Pacific Branch, Entomological Society of America.
A strong supporter of community outreach and STEM, Page has been active in leadership activities in the summer program, Girls Outdoor Adventure and Leadership (GOALS) since August 2017. The free program targets underrepresented teens. Page has served as a program co-organizer, mentor and lecturer. She helped organize the 2021 summer program, led a lecture on introductory data analysis, and assisted students with their community science project (identifying pollinators in urban gardens).
Page was also active in Center for Land-Based Learning, serving as a mentor in the Student and Landowner Education and Watershed Stewardship. She mentored high school students, engaging them in hands-on conservation science at Say Hay Farm in Yolo County, and teaching them about how wildflower plantings benefit bees.
Page and postdoctoral researcher Charlie Casey Nicholson of Williams lab co-authored the November 2021 cover story, A Meta-Analysis of Single Visit Pollination Effectiveness Comparing Honeybees and other Floral Visitors, in the American Journal of Botany
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Back in the 2009, a team of University of California scientists, led by Gordon Frankie of UC Berkeley and Robbin Thorp (1933-2019) of UC Davis, wrote this incredible article, "Native Bees are a Rich Natural Resource in Urban California Gardens," published in California Agriculture (UC Agriculture and Natural Resources).
It's an excellent resource.
The abstract:
"Evidence is mounting that pollinators of crop and wildland plants are declining worldwide. Our research group at UC Berkeley and UC Davis conducted a 3-year survey of bee pollinators in seven cities from Northern California to Southern California. Results indicate that many types of urban residential gardens provide floral and nesting resources for the reproduction and survival of bees, especially a diversity of native bees. Habitat gardening for bees, using targeted ornamental plants, can predictably increase bee diversity and abundance, and provide clear pollination benefits."
Jennifer Hernandez, Barbara Ertter, Jaime Pawelek, Sara Witt, Mary Schindler, Rollin Coville, and Victoria Wojcik. Coville provided the images.
"Outdoor urban areas worldwide are known to support a rich diversity of insect life (Frankie and Ehler 1978)," they wrote. "Some insects are undesirable and characterized as pests, such as aphids, snails, earwigs and borers; urban residents are most aware of these. Other urban insects are considered beneficial or aesthetically pleasing, such as ladybird beetles and butterflies; this category includes a rich variety of insects whose roles in gardens go largely unnoticed and are thus underappreciated (Grissell 2001; Tallamy 2009). They regularly visit flowers and pollinate them, an important ecological service."
"We report the results of a 2005-to-2007 survey of bees and their associations with a wide variety of ornamental plant species in seven urban areas, from Northern California to Southern California. While non-native honey bees (Apis mellifera) are common in many gardens, numerous California native bee species also visit urban ornamental flowers. Of about 4,000 bee species known in the entire United States, about 1,600 have been recorded in California."
That deserves to be repeated. Of the 4000 bee species known in the United States, about 1600 reside in California. See some of them listed on the chart above.
Notice it includes the non-native bee, the honey bee, Apis mellfera. It is an "introduced bee," although numerous non-scientists think it's a native. European colonists introduced it to America (in what is now Virginia) in 1622.
The phrase, "Save the (Honey) Bees," became prominent during the colony collapse disorder. But the bees that need saving now are the natives.
If you want to know more about the native bees in California, this book should be in your library: California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists by UC-affiliated scientists
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