Jan. 11, 2013
His talk, "Buzzed for Bees," is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Rush Ranch Educational Council and the Solano Land Trust.
Thorp will display bee specimens, and discuss the importance of providing bee habitat. He is a noted authority on native bees in vernal pools, the ecology of bumble bees, and honey bee pollination.
Thorp joined the UC Davis Department of Entomology faculty in 1964 and retired in 1994. Although "officially" retired, he continues to do research, write publications, and deliver lectures. He teaches at The Bee Course, a workshop held annually at the Southwestern Research Station, Portal, Arizona. The course is for conservation biologists, pollination ecologists and other biologists who want to gain greater knowledge of the systematics and biology of bees.
One of his numerous research projects is monitoring the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a half-acre bee friendly garden and demonstration garden planted south of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road. Over the last several years, he has found and identified more than 75 bee species. California has some 1600 species of native bees. Worldwide, the different bees species total 20,000.
Thorp is also co-authoring a book on urban bees and is a docent and instructor at the Solano Land Trust's Jepson Prairie Reserve.
Thorp recently wrote an article, "Native Bees and Flowers in California Prairies and Grasslands" in Fremontia, a publication of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS), is devoted to the state's declining prairies and grasslands. He is a 35-year member of CNPS.
He quoted John Muir in his book, The Mountains of California: "When California was wild, it was one sweet bee-garden throughout its entire length...the Great Central Plain of California, during the months of March, April, and May, was one smooth, continuous bed of honey-bloom, so marvelously rich that in waking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step."
In the article, Thorp calls attention to some of the flowers found today in the Central Valley grasslands. "Our state flower, the California poppy (Eschscholzia californica) produces no nectar, but only pollen as a reward to bees...Generalist bumble bees (Bombus spp.) and sweat bees (Halictus spp.) are the main visitors, along with small pollen feeding beetles."
Directions to the Rush Ranch: To reach the site, from Highway 12 in Suisun City, head south on Grizzly Island Road for about two miles. The entrance gate is on the right. The workshop takes place in the Nature Center past the big white barn.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
Jan. 10, 2013
When blue orchard bees and wild bees are foraging in almonds with honey bees, the behavior of honey bees changes, resulting in more effective crop pollination, said lead author Claire Brittain, a former post-doctoral fellow from Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany and now associated with the Neal Williams lab at the University of California, Davis. Wild bees include non-managed bees such as bumble bees, carpenter bees and sweat bees.
“These findings highlight the importance of conserving pollinators and the natural habitats they rely on,” Brittain said. “Not only can they play an important direct role in crop pollination, but we also show that they can improve the pollination service of honey bees in almonds.”
Agroecologist Alexandra-Maria Klein, a professor at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany, served as the project lead while a postdoctoral fellow in the UC Berkeley lab of conservation biologist/professor Claire Kremen. Klein and Kremen initiated the project in 2008 and continued working on the project together in 2009 and 2010.
The research, “Synergistic Effects of Non-Apis Bees and Honey Bees for Pollination Services,” appears in the Jan. 9th edition. California’s almond acreage now totals 800,000s, and each acre requires two bee hives for pollination. Honey bee-health problems have sparked new concern over pollination services.
“In orchards with non-Apis (non-honey bees), the foraging behavior of honey bees changed and the pollination effectiveness of a single honey bee visit was greater than in orchards where non-Apis bees were absent,” the researchers wrote in their abstract.
Brittain said that the field experiments “show that a diversity of pollinators can improve pollination service, through species interactions that alter the behavior and effectiveness of a dominant pollinator species.”
“This is one of our first demonstrations on how to increase the efficiency of honey bee pollination through diversification of pollinators,” said Williams, who joined the team in 2010. “With increasing demands for pollination-dependent crops globally, and continued challenges that limit the supply of honey bees, such strategies to increase pollination efficiency offer exciting potential for more sustainable pollination in the future.”
The declining population of honey bees, particularly due to colony collapse disorder (CCD) is troubling. Bee scientists attribute the mysterious malady to multiple factors, including pests, pesticides, parasites, diseases, malnutrition and stress.
“Almond is a $3 billion industry in California,” said Kremen, who is also an affiliate with the UC Davis Department of Entomology and works closely with scientists at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis. “Our study shows that native bees, through their interactions with honey bees, increase the pollination efficiency of honey bees--the principal bee managed for almond pollination--and thus the amount of fruit set.”
Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, identified the bees in the Klein-Kremen project. The species he identified for the project in 2008-2009 totaled 50 species, including bumble bees, small carpenter bees, sweat bees, digger bees, mining bees and blue orchard bees.
Future directions? “The project is ongoing and we plan to investigate further the mechanism behind the increased effectiveness of honey bees when other bees are present,” Brittain said. “We are also going to be looking at how to enhance floral resources for wild bees in almond orchards.”
“Now we know about bee behavior—that they move more between orchard rows when non-Apis bees are around—we need to study the reason why they move,” Brittain noted. “One route we will be exploring is the chemical footprints that the bees are leaving on the flowers.”
Professor Klein lectured on “Can Wild Pollinators Contribute, Augment and Complement Almond Pollination in California” at a seminar on Feb. 17, 2010 to the UC Davis Department of Entomology. Her seminar was video-recorded and can be viewed here: https://admin.na4.acrobat.com/_a841422360/p37649788/
Almonds are California’s biggest export. The National Agricultural Statistics Service is forecasting a record-breaking 2.10 billion meat pounds this year, valued at approximately $3 billion. Eighty-percent of the global supply of almonds is grown in California, and about 70 percent of California’s crop is marketed overseas.
To pollinate California’s almond orchards, approximately 2.6 million colonies are required. They are trucked into California from all over the country for the almond pollination season, which typically begins around Valentine’s Day.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
Jan. 2, 2013
When the hairs of a “sticky plant” trap small insects or “insect tourists,” the plant can benefit in ways most people never think about, say researchers in the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis.
The “tourist trap” provides food for other predators, thus becoming a defensive mechanism that spares the plant from increased herbivore damage. Other beneficial results include greater plant fitness and increased fruit production.
“We conducted a large, simple field experiment to test the hypothesis that plant-trapped insects could enhance indirect defense by increasing predator densities,” said ecologist Billy Krimmel, a graduate student in the Jay Rosenheim lab, who worked with fellow ecologist Ian Pearse of the Richard Karban lab. Pearse is now a postdoctoral fellow in Walter Koenig’s laboratory at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
“Sticky plants--those producing resinous, oily or hooked trichomes (hairs)--often entrap small insects that land on them as they pass by,” Krimmel said. “This insect carrion functions as a type of plant-provided food for defense.”
“This is the first example of such a plant-provided food being captured from the external environment,” Krimmel said. “We coined the term 'tourist trap', referring to the sticky hairs that catch insect passers-by.”
"We believe that carrion may be an overlooked, but generally important component of food webs and plant-herbivore interactions,” said Pearse, noting that “most studies ignore insects after they die, but the presence of their carrion may be an important component of food webs.”
"We have known for a long time that carnivorous plants entrap insects for their own benefit,” Pearse said. “In our current study, we found that the entrapment of insects by plants might be even more important and general than previously thought."
Krimmel and Pearse conducted their research in the Stebbens Cold Canyon Reserve, a UC Davis Nature Reserve located in Solano County, just west of Winters and near the outlet of Lake Berryessa. Their sticky plant was tarweed (Madia elegans), an annual flowering California native plant in the family Asteraceae. It generally flowers in mid to late summer, from approximately June through September.
At our study site, tarweed's major herbivore is the specialist caterpillar Heliothodes diminutiva, which feeds largely on plant reproductive organs and can completely sterilise its host plants,” they wrote. The adult owlet moth, Heliothodes diminutive, lays its eggs on the developing buds. The emerging caterpillars can quickly devour all the flowers and buds.
“The suite of predators commonly found on tarweed,” they wrote, “includes the assassin bug Pselliopus spinicollis, two stilt bugs Hoplinus echinatus and Jalysus wickhami, the green lynx spider Peucetia sp. and the crab spider Mecaphesa schlingeri. All can navigate tarweed's sticky surface.”
Krimmel and Pearse chose 82 tarweed plants for their experiment. They placed dead Drosophila fruit flies to half of them, five flies per week through the growing season, and then monitored all the plants throughout the growing season.
“Because tarweed is a small, annual plant, we were able to do full counts of arthropods on all plants each week, and measure lifetime fruit production by the plants, allowing us to relate our experimental treatment to plant lifetime fitness,” the authors wrote.
“The addition of 5 dead fruit flies (carrion) to plants each week over the growing season increased the abundance of all surveyed predatory arthropods associated with M. elegans plants by 76 percent to 450 percent,. For P. spinoicollis, the most abundant predator, this effect was strongest during the early growth season in June and July.”
Specifically, “the addition of carrion (fruit flies) to M. elegans plants produced a 60 percent decrease in bud damage caused by H. diminutiva, the dominant lepidopteran herbivore in this system and increased lifetime fruit production by 10 percent,” the researchers said.
The project was funded by Jay Rosenheim through a USDA multi-state research Hatch grant, and two grants awarded to Krimmel: a National Science Foundation/Graduate Research Fellowship and a Jastro-Shields Research Scholarship.
The Dec. 20th edition of the journal Nature published an article on the Krimmel-Pearse research in its ecology section: "When Plants Run the Food Chain."
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
Jan. 7, 2013
Smith will speak on "Amazing Insect Lives," focusing on "the many great mechanisms insects have for survival," says club spokesperson/founder Edgar Ortega.
Ortega is also inviting folks to bring and display their collections.
The club is open to "all bug lovers of Northern California--insect hobbyists, collectors, tarantula enthusiasts and invertebrate keepers," says Ortego, who is also founder/president of the Central Valley Herpetological Society.
Plans call for the California Bug Club to meet every other month with informative presentations from professionals in their fields. These will include entomologists, arachnologists, expert hobbyist, breeders and others.
Ortega says on the Bug Club's website:
"Want to join us for a night of blacklighting for insects? Care to participate in our exploration hikes, surveys, and tarantula hunts? Want to learn how to properly preserve and mount specimens? Do you have questions for the experts? Want to identify a bug, start an insect collection, learn to care for certain species, or just want to explore your curiosity about the natural world? California Bug Club offers each of these things and more."
You can also "like" the club's Facebook page.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894
The event is free and open to the public. The site is located on Crocker Avenue, formerly California Drive.
Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum and UC Davis professor of entomology, says "the biggest and the baddest" include:
- Greatest wingspan – the white witch moth from Central America (11 inches)
- Heaviest beetle – the African goliath beetle (2 ounces, and fist-sized)
- Loudest insect – the American cicada (108 decibels, as loud as a power saw or rock concert)
- Fastest flier – horseflies (more than 80 miles per hour)
- Most painful sting – the tarantula hawk wasp
- Deadliest insect – the house fly for vectoring more than 250 different human pathogens
- Fastest runner – the tiger beetle at 5 miles per hour
- Deadliest insect – the harvester ant, sting 3 times as toxic as honey bee venom
- Most beautiful moth – the moon moths and rainbow moths
The Bohart Museum houses a global collection of nearly eight million insect specimens and is the seventh largest insect collection in North America. It is also the home of the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity. Noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart (1913-2007) founded the museum in 1946.
Bohart officials schedule weekend open houses throughout the academic year so that families and others who cannot attend on the weekdays can do so on the weekends. The Bohart’s regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday. The insect museum is closed to the public on Fridays and on major holidays. Admission is free.
The Bohart Museum also includes a gift shop where visitors can purchase t-shirts, sweatshirts, posters, insect nets, books and jewelry. A live "petting zoo" features Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas.
The remainder of the open houses for the 2012-2013 academic year are:
Saturday, Feb. 2, 1 to 4 p.m.
Theme: "Biodiversity Museum Day"
Sunday, March 24, 1 to 4 p.m.
Theme: "Aquatic Insects"
Saturday, April 20: 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Theme: UC Davis Picnic Day
Saturday, May 11, 1 to 4 p.m.
Theme: "Moth-er's Day"
Sunday, June 9, 1 to 4 p.m.
Theme: "How to Find Insects"
For further information, contact Lynn Kimsey at lskimsey@ucdavis.edu or senior museum scientist Steve Heydon at slheydon@ucdavis.edu. The phone number: (530) 752-0493.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894