- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Don't miss the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology virtual open house on alfalfa and rice from 11 a.m. to noon on Thursday, Oct. 22.
Cooperative Extension agricultural specialist Ian Grettenberger, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and his second-year graduate student, Madison "Madi" Hendrick, will discuss the crops, the pests, and the natural enemies or beneficials.
The good: Think the lady beetle, aka ladybug, that can devour some 50 aphids a day.
The bad: Think the larvae of the alfalfa butterfly, a major pest of alfalfa. Other pests of alfalfa include the Western yellowstriped armyworm, beet armyworm, and alfalfa weevil. Among the pests of rice: armyworms, aster leafhoppers, crayfish, rice leafminers, rice seed midges, rice water weevils and tadpole shrimp.
The bugly: Think all the arthropods--pests and natural enemies.
The event, "The Good and the Bad: Insects and Other Arthropods in Agriculture, with a Focus on California Rice and Alfalfa," will be live-streamed on the Bohart Museum of Entomology's Facebook page. (Link to Facebook live here). Grettenberger and Hendrick will present short talks and then field questions. No personal Facebook account is required to join the session, which is free and open to the public.
As Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator of the Bohart Museum, says: "This is all about the arthropods, both the pests and beneficials that they study in the rice and alfalfa fields." Most of the focus is on insects, but tadpole shrimp in rice fields also will be discussed." A virtual family craft activity on rice is also planned.
"I will be discussing some of the insect (or arthropod) problems faced by growers of rice in California and some of the challenges in managing them, Grettenberger said. "In rice, some of the key arthropod pests are tadpole shrimp, which can turn what would have been a lush stand if rice into a poor stand with a lot of floating seedlings. Meanwhile, later in the year, armyworm caterpillars, the larvae of a moth, can chew on rice leaves and destroy plants. I'll discuss some of the ongoing work to better understand and manage these pests."
Grettenberger, Yolo County Farm Advisor Rachael Freeman Long and Madi Hendrick recently wrote a piece in the UC Agricultural and Natural Resources (UC ANR) blog, Alfalfa and Forage News, "A (Virtual )Update on Worms, Weevils an Aphids in Alfalfa."
The Bohart Museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis professor of entomology, is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, but is temporarily closed. The museum houses nearly eight million insect specimens; a live "petting zoo" of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and taranatulas; and a gift shop stocked with insect-themed T-shirts, books, posters, jewelry, candy and insect-collecting equipment. (Gift items can now be shipped during the closure.)
More information on the Bohart Museum's virtual presentation is available on its website or by contacting Yang at tabyang@ucdavis.edu.



- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey

The Bohart Museum will live-stream the free open house on Facebook. Entomologist Jeff Smith, who curates the 500,000 Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) collection, will show specimens and answer questions.
"We started holding a moth-themed open house near Mother's Day in May, because people who are enthusiasts for moths are called moth-ers,” said Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum. “We then switched our programming to align with National Moth Week. This year's Moth Week is July 18-26. The annual event is celebrated throughout the world with private and public events.
Bohart Museum officials are preparing videos on black-lighting and how to spread and pin moths.
During the Facebook Live program, viewers can type in their questions on moths.
Smith is expected to answer questions such as:
- What is the largest moth?
- How do butterflies and moths differ?
- What is so unique about moths?
- Why should we be concerned with moth diversity?
Kimsey, who has directed the museum since 1989, remembers when Smith joined the museum. “When Jeff was working for Univar Environmental Services, a 35-year career until his retirement in 2013, he would spend some of his vacation days at the museum. Over the years Jeff took over more and more of the curation of the butterfly and moth collection. He took home literally thousands of field pinned specimens and spread their wings at home, bringing them back to the museum perfectly mounted. To date he has spread the wings on more than 200,000 butterflies and moths. This translates into something like 33,000 hours of work!” The numbers have since increased.
“About a decade ago, Jeff began helping us by assembling specimen drawers from kits that we purchased,” Kimsey related. “This substantially lowered our curatorial costs, from $50/drawer to $16/drawer. We use several hundred drawers a year to accommodate donated specimens, research vouchers and specimens resulting from research grants and inventories. More recently, he's been accumulating scrap lumber and making the drawers from scratch at no cost to us. Overall, he has made more than 2000 drawers. Additionally, he makes smaller specimen boxes with the leftover scrap wood, which are used by students taking various field courses in the department. We simply could not curate the collection without his contributions.”
Kimsey praised Smith for completely reorganizing the butterfly and moth collection. “It's no small feat to rearrange this many specimens, housed in roughly one thousand drawers,” she said. “Many thousands of the specimens needed to be identified, and the taxonomy required extensive updating and reorganization.”
The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus, houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is also the home of the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. Noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007) founded the museum.
The Bohart Museum is the home of a “live” petting zoo featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas, and a gift shop stocked with T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.
Link:
Spreading Wings: The Amazing Work of Bohart Museum Associate Jeff Smith



- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
If you marked your calendar to attend the Saturday, March 21 open house at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis campus, you can unmark it.
For now.
The Bohart Museum of Entomology has postponed its open house to comply with the new UC Davis policies regarding coronavirus pandemic cautions. Officials initially set the open house, themed "Pollinators and Microbes," from 1 to 4 p.m.
In the meantime, head out to your favorite pollinator garden and see what's foraging. You might see not only honey bees, but yellow-faced bumble bees (Bombus vosnesenskii), Gulf Fritillaries (Agraulis vanillae) mourning cloaks (Nymphalis antiopa) and more. Spring begins March 19!
"Studying insects is something you can do anytime or anywhere," Bohart officials said. "We recommend that individuals and families get outside and explore arthropods. Here are great info sheets for many of the common arthropods in a California backyard or a local park.
- Common Insects, Information Sheets (Written by Bohart director Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis professor of entomology.
- How to Collect Insects (Video)
The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane, and directed by Lynn Kimsey, UC Davis professor of entomology, houses nearly 8 million insect specimens, a live petting zoo, and a gift shop.
Department Seminars
The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology weekly Wednesday seminars are now virtual seminars and are being live-streamed through Zoom and linked on the department's website, says coordinator Rachel Vannette, community ecologist and assistant professor. (See list of spring seminars)
Plant Sale
The UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden Plant Sale, initially slated March 14, is also canceled due to the coronavirus outbreak, now global.
For information on the coronavirus, see the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website.
UC Davis Directives as of March 12 (See website for updates)
From Chancellor Gary May:
Acting out of an abundance of caution amid the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak, we have decided to take additional steps in our efforts to protect our students, faculty and staff, and the community at large, as we all do our part to help contain the spread of the virus.
We take these actions in consultation with the UC Office of the President, the Academic Senate and campus administrators, as well as Yolo County Public Health (which, as of today, has reported one confirmed case of COVID-19 in the county, none on the Davis campus). As this situation continues to evolve rapidly, we will respond with further directives. For now, this letter addresses the following topics:
Gatherings — Mandating the cancellation or postponement of events with planned attendance of more than 150 people, from Thursday, March 12, through March 31. We are evaluating this timing on an ongoing basis, as we continue to consult with public health officials. This mandate does not apply to instruction through the end of this week. Our overarching goals: For the sake of everyone's health, we want to minimize face-to-face contact, in instruction and office hours, in workspaces and large gatherings. And we want to emphasize to students, staff and faculty: If you are sick, stay home.
Instruction
As we strive to minimize face-to-face contact, we announced March 7 that faculty and students have maximum flexibility to complete their Winter Quarter work without having in-class instruction. We are now strongly encouraging faculty to go online with their teaching. We said webinars would be available to faculty who needed assistance making the conversion — and we now have a schedule of four different webinars on quizzes/exams and other Canvas tools, and web conferencing and video. Each is being presented daily, every day this week. The schedule and links are here on the Keep Teaching website. It is very likely that we will need to have online capacity in place for Spring Quarter classes.
Faculty also are strongly encouraged to make use of other technologies, such as Zoom and Facetime, to provide opportunities for students to approach them with questions.
Graduate and professional instruction: Given the special nature of graduate and professional instruction, we ask the faculty involved to use their discretion in endeavoring to optimize curricular delivery (as well as graduate advising and mentoring) while remaining mindful of public health advice to observe social distancing to the extent possible. We encourage graduate and professional instructors to utilize opportunities for virtual instruction and testing where appropriate.
See more at https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/coronavirus-new-campus-directives/


- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Those who painted rocks at the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology open house on Saturday, Jan. 18 were not just rock artists. They were rock stars, painting creative, inspirational and seasonal illustrations.
A sign on the table, staffed by entomologist Ann Kao of the California Department of Food and Agriculture (2019 alumnus of UC Davis), urged: "Paint a Rock!" The directions:
- Please choose a rock
- Be creative, you can write a kind message on it
- You may keep it or hide it somewhere outside
And that they did. They selected a smooth river rock and made it their own. They painted everything from butterflies, ants, and spiders to rainbows, smiles and the sun. Indeed, some of the critters looked like new species of arthropods just waiting to be named.
The artists hid some of the rocks on the UC Davis campus. They are likely to wind up on the Facebook page, UC Davis Rocks, which encourages folks to paint rocks, hide them, and then post the images. The Bohart rocks will join other images on the Facebook page, including such resident rocks as "When All Else Fails, Hug the Dog" to "Take the Next Step" to "You Are Loved."
One talented rock artist at the Bohart Museum chose a Valentine's Day theme, painting two "Love Bugs”--a honey bee and a ladybug. The colorful rock now resides in the office of director Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis. It's right next to her microscope where she will 'scope the real Apis mellifera and Coccinellidae species and other insects.
If you look on the Internet, you'll find some creative, inspirational and downright humorous rocks:
- "Life Is Short; Eat the Cupcake"
- "A Laugh Is a Smile that Bursts"
- "Papa Was a Rolling Stone"
- "Be a Rainbow in Someone Else's Cloud"
- And this two-sided rock: On one side, a simple three-word request, "Turn Me Over," and on the other side, a 10-word admonishment: "You Just Took Orders from a Rock. Are You Stoned?"
Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator, coordinated the open house, which showcased the research of six doctoral students: Charlotte Herbert Alberts, Yao Cai, Alexander Dedmon, Zachary Griebenow, Crystal Homicz and Ann Holmes. (See Bug Squad blog).
The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane and founded by noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007), houses a global collection of nearly eight million insect specimens; a live "petting zoo" that includes Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas; and a gift shop stocked with books, insect-themed t-shirts and sweatshirts, jewelry, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy. The insect museum is open to the public Mondays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m., except on holidays. More information on the Bohart Museum is available on the website at http://bohart.ucdavis.edu or by contacting (530) 752-0493 or bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
Hmmm....did we say the "Bohart Museum houses a global collection of nearly eight million insects specimens?" Correct that! Make that "a global collection of nearly eight million insect specimens and one local Love Bug rock."





- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
For three hours, six UC Davis doctoral students discussed their research and fielded questions from the 270-plus guests, ranging from pre-kindergarten students to senior citizens. The event, free and family friendly, followed the theme, "Time Flies When You Are Studying Insects: Cutting Edge Student Research."
Doctoral students who showcased their research were:
- Entomologist Yao Cai of the Joanna Chiu lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Cai, a fourth-year doctoral student, studies circadian clock in insects. “Using Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) and Danaus plexippus (monarch butterfly), as models, we seek to understand how these insects receive environmental time cues and tell time, how they organize their daily rhythms in physiology and behavior, such as feeding, sleep and migration (in monarch butterfly),” he said. Assisting him were Nitrol Liu, a graduate student in the Chiu lab, and associate Ben Kunimoto, a Davis Senior High School student. - Entomologist Charlotte Herbert Alberts, who studies assassin flies (also known as robber flies) with major professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology.
“Assassin flies are voracious predators on other insects and are able to overcome prey much larger than themselves,” said Alberts, a fifth-year doctoral student. “Both adult and larval assassin flies are venomous. Their venom consists of neurotoxins that paralyze their prey, and digestive enzymes that allow assassin flies to consume their prey in a liquid form. These flies are incredibly diverse, ranging in size from 5-60mm, and can be found all over the world! With over 7,500 species, Asilidae is the third most specious family of flies. Despite assassin flies being very common, most people do not even know of their existence. This may be due to their impressive ability to mimic other insects, mainly wasps, and bees.” - Entomologist-ant specialist Zachary Griebenow of the Phil Ward lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Griebenow, a third-year doctoral student, showed specimens of the ant subfamily Leptanillinae, most of them male. He emphasized the great morphological diversity observed in males and talked about his systematic revision of the subfamily. In particular, he explained "how the study of an extremely obscure group of ants can help us understand the process of evolution that has given rise to all organisms." - Forest entomologist Crystal Homicz, who studies with Joanna Chiu and research forest entomologist Chris Fettig, Pacific Southwest Research Station, USDA Forest Service, Davis. (She formerly studied with the late Steve Seybold of USDA Forest Service and the Department of Entomology and Nematology.)
"Bark beetles are an incredibly important feature of forests, especially as disturbance agents," said Homicz, a first-year doctoral student. Her research focuses on how bark beetles and fire interact, "given that these are the two most important disturbance agents of the Sierra Nevada." She discussed how the interaction between bark beetles and fire, why bark beetles and fire are important feature of our forest ecosystem. She also discussed more generally "the importance of bark beetles in many forest systems throughout North America." Assisting at her table: Gabe Foote, a new first-year doctoral student in forest entomology. - Forensic entomologist Alexander Dedmon, who studies with Robert Kimsey, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
"My research focuses on insect succession," said Dedmon, a fifth-year doctoral student. "In forensic entomology, succession uses the patterns of insects that come and go from a body. These patterns help us estimate how long a person has been dead." Visitors learned about "the many different ways insects can be used as evidence, and what that evidence tells us." - Ecologist Ann Holmes, affiliated with the Graduate Group in Ecology, Department of Animal Science, and the Genomic Variation Laboratory, studies with major professors Andrea Schreier and Mandi Finger.
Holmes, a fourth-year doctoral student, talked about her research project that looks at insects eaten by bats in the Yolo Bypass. "The insects eat crops such as rice, so bats provide a valuable service to farmers," she explained. "Hungry bats can eat as much as their own body weight in insects each night." Visitors learned how DNA is used to detect insects in bat guano (poop). "Insects in bat poop are hard to identify because they have been digested, but I can use DNA to determine which insects are there. We care about which insects bats eat because bats are natural pest controllers. With plenty of bats we can use less pesticide on farms and less mosquito repellent on ourselves."
Entomologist Jeff Smith, curator of the Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) section, and Bohart associate and naturalist Greg Kareofelas showed part of the Lepidoptera collection, which totals nearly 500,000 specimens. UC Davis entomologist graduate Ann Kau staffed the craft activity table--rock painting. The rocks, mostly insect-themed, will be hidden on campus. Undergraduate student Ian Clark displayed the critters in the live "petting zoo," including Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas. (Photos in the next Bug Squad blog). Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator, organized a scavenger hunt featuring questions and clues about insects.
The Bohart Museum, directed by entomology professor Lynn Kimsey and founded by noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007), houses a global collection of nearly eight million specimens. It is also the home of the seventh largest insect collection in North America, and the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of insect biodiversity.
The insect museum is open to the public Mondays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m., except on holidays. More information on the Bohart Museum is available on the website at http://bohart.ucdavis.edu or by contacting (530) 752-0493 or bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
Meanwhile, UC Davis is gearing up for its ninth annual Biodiversity Museum Day on Saturday, Feb. 15, featuring 13 museums or collections. Free and family friendly, the event is a science-based day at which visitors of all ages can meet and talk with UC Davis scientists—from undergraduates to staff to emeriti professors, coordinator Tabatha Yang of the Bohart Museum said.











