Sept. 10, 2012
DAVIS--The Bohart Museum of Entomology will celebrate honey bees, native bees in California, and bees found worldwide at two concurrent open houses set from 1 to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 15. The theme is “Flower Lovers: The Bees.”

One open house will be at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, 1124 Academic Surge on Crocker Lane, formerly California Avenue (off La Rue Road) and the other at the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven on Bee Biology Road, off Hutchison Drive/Hopkins Road, west of the central campus.

The Bohart Museum, part of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, is arranging both events and “we’re hoping people will travel from one to the other and participate in both,” said Tabatha Yang, the Bohart Museum’s education and outreach coordinator.

Tables at the Bohart Museum will feature craft activities and a display of bees from all over the world. Among those participating will be Yang; senior museum scientist Steve Heydon; and graduate student Matan Shelomi. The museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis, houses more than seven million insect specimens, and is also home to a live “petting zoo,” including Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and rose-haired tarantula.

At the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven the agenda will include a recognition ceremony for Derek Tully, 17, of Davis at 1:30 p.m. As his Eagle Scout project, he planned, organized and supervised the building of the haven fence, saving the Department of Entomology at least $24,000, according to Kimsey.  He began the project April 2 and completed it Sept. 7.

The haven open house will include a display table on native bees, staffed by Neal Williams, assistant professor of entomology and graduate student Katharina Ullmann; honey bees, headed by staff research associate Billy Synk; and a crafts table, staffed by the UC Davis Entomology Club. Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, a noted honey bee expert, will field questions.

Christine Casey of the UC Davis Department of Entomology will guide a tour of the haven from 2 to 2:30 p.m.

The Bohart Museum of Entomology, founded in 1946 and named for noted entomologist Richard M. Bohart, is dedicated to teaching, research and service.  It is open to the public from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday.  It is closed to the public on Fridays. Admission is free.  Weekend open houses are scheduled once a month.

More information is available on the Bohart Museum website at http://bohart.ucdavis.edu/or by contacting Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator at tabyang@ucdavis.edu or (530) 752-0493.

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--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894

DAVIS—It wasn't a “one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater,” but it sure looked strange to him.

When a Davis resident felled a plum tree, hordes of green-eyed, apricot-colored insects tumbled from the wood.

What were they?

They buzzed like bees. They loomed larger than bumble bees. And they disliked being disturbed.

The Davis resident took them to the Bohart Museum of Entomology, University of California, Davis, for identification.

“Male carpenter bees, Xylocopa varipuncta, also known as Valley carpenter bees,” said entomologist Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology.

“Some of us refer to these males as ‘teddy bear' bees, because of their yellowish-brownish color and fuzzy burly bodies,” said UC Davis emeritus entomology professor Robbin Thorp, who studies pollinators. “The females are all black with violaceous (violet) reflections on their dark wings.”

All females in the plum tree holes escaped.

Carpenter bees, so named for their ability to tunnel through wood to make their nests,  carve with their mandibles (jaws) but do not ingest the wood. Only the females excavate the tunnels, which average six to 10 inches in depth.

Carpenter bees, measuring about an inch long, are the largest bees in California. Their eggs are the largest of all insect eggs. The Valley carpenter bee egg can be 15mm long.

The males are territorial, Kimsey said, and can be quite aggressive. They hover and lie in wait for passing females.

“Female carpenter bees sting, but the males don't have that apparatus,” Kimsey said. “You can pick up the fuzzy males and they won't sting you.”

“We have them around our home (in Davis) when the wisteria blooms,” she said. “Many people think they're bumble bees because of their size. They think they're fluffy yellow bumble bees.”

Thorp said he tries to convince people to learn to live with these bees as “they are important pollinators in our environment and have potential as pollinators of some crops.”
   
“Carpenter bees are beneficial in that they pollinate flowers in native

plant communities and gardens,” he said. “That far outweighs any damage to wood structures.”

“These bees are not currently managed for crop pollination,” Thorp said, “but there have been some recent studies of their potential for pollination of greenhouse tomatoes. They are good at buzz pollination and can be managed by providing suitable nest materials.”  

Due to their large size, carpenter bees cannot enter tubelike blossoms such as sage, so they slit the base of corolla, a practice known as “stealing the nectar” (without pollinating the flower).

The Valley carpenter bee species is commonly found in southern California but is not all that well known in the Central Valley. “I have observed them in the field in southern California and in the Sacramento area,” Thorp said. “In the past few years, they seem to have become more common in the Davis area.  I even found a dead male on my driveway (in Davis) a month or so ago.”

“They are quite awesome to observe especially when they are cruising shrubs or vines at head height as I saw one year outside the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History,” Thorp said.   

Carpenter bees, especially the most common species in the Central Valley,  X. tabaniformis orpifex, are often mistaken for bumble bees. Like bumble bees, female carpenter bees exhibit similar size and coloration. However, a carpenter bee generally has a hairless, shiny abdomen while the bumble bee abdomen is typically covered with dense hair, and often with yellow markings.  

Thorp said three species occur in California. “Of the three species, X. varipuncta (with the golden teddy bear males) and X. tabaniformis orpifex are the only two that occur in the Central Valley,” he said. “The third species, X. californica occurs primarily in the foothill areas surrounding the Central Valley.”  

To build their nests, the females select telephone poles, fences, decks, railings, eaves, siding, outdoor furniture and tree trunks. They prefer bare, unpainted or weathered wood, especially redwood, cedar, cypress and pine. They generally avoid painted or pressure-treated wood.

Carpenter bees overwinter as adults in the tunnels and emerge in the spring.

Brian Turner, the Bohart Museum 's public outreach coordinator, said the sculpted holes in the chunk of plum wood that the Davis resident brought in “look professionally drilled.” The holes are elongated and intricately sculpted to contain the brood and food storage.

Turner released the male carpenter bees, but museum visitors can see the plum wood holes.

The museum, located in 1124 Academic Surge, is dedicated to teaching, research and service. It houses the seventh largest insect collection in North America. The global collection totals more than seven million specimens, and focuses on terrestrial and fresh water invertebrates.

The museum is also home of the California Insect Survey, a storehouse of the insect biodiversity of California's deserts, ountains, coast and great central valley. 

Three Carpenter Bee Species in California This is a female Xylocopata tabaniformis orpifex robbing nectar from sage. Click to enlarge. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey) UC Davis emeritus entomology professor Robbin Thorp says California is home to three carpenter bee species. Xylocopa varipuncta occurs in the Central Valley and southern California, Arizona, New Mexico and southward through Mexico.  It is large (about the size of a queen bumble bee), with all black females and golden/buff-colored males with green eyes.   Females have dark wings with violet reflections. X. californica occurs in the foothills surrounding the Central Valley, the Transverse Ranges (Los Angeles) of southern California, and areas of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. It is large, nearly the size of X. varipuncta, but with distinctive bluish metallic reflections on the body.  Females have dark smokey brown wings. X. tabaniformis orpifex occurs in most of the same areas as X. californica, but extends more into the center of the Central Valley, probably due primarily to increased nest sites such as redwood arbors and fences. It can be a pest when it gets into untreated redwood used for water tanks or structural timbers.  It is the smallest of the three species, much larger than a honey bee, but about half the size of the other two carpenter bees.  Females are black with light smokey-colored wings.  The male has bright yellow marks on the lower part of its face and some yellow hairs on the top front of its thorax

 

DAVIS--Entomologist Lynn Kimsey, director of the R. M. Bohart Museum of Entomology and director of the Center for Biosystematics, has been named interim chair of the University of California, Davis, Department of Entomology.

Her appointment, announced last week by Neal Van Alfen, dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, was confirmed Monday, March 10 by Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef. She will serve until July 2009.

Chemical ecologist Walter Leal, professor of entomology, served as chair from July 2006 through February. The chair is a rotational position shared among faculty.

Kimsey, professor of entomology and an insect taxonomist specializing in bees and wasps and insect diversity, joined the UC Davis faculty in 1989. She received her doctorate in entomology in 1979. She has served as director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology since 1989.

Kimsey said she plans to follow the tradition of the late Richard Bohart by bringing her microscope to the chair's office. Bohart, who was Kimsey's major professor, chaired the department from 1956 to 1965 and retired in 1980 as an emeritus professor. During his career, Bohart identified more than one million mosquitoes and wasps, many now displayed at the Bohart Museum, a teaching, research and public service facility that he founded on campus in 1946. The museum collection totals more than seven million specimens, and focuses on terrestrial and fresh water invertebrates.

Kimsey's other office is in Academy Surge, where the Bohart Museum is housed.

As to future plans, “We're continuing to build up our bee biology program,” Kimsey said. “We'll be hiring a bee pollination biologist soon and are now accepting applications for the Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.”  The premier ice cream company recently donated $100,000 to the Laidlaw facility to address the bee population decline.

“I can empathize with colony collapse disorder (CCD) because the hive we have in our backyard in Davis is the victim of CCD,” she said. “The bees vanished, leaving all the honey there.”

The faculty completed interviews for the bee pollination biologist in January. The new position will be housed at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, west of the central campus.

Kimsey's husband, Robert Kimsey, a forensic entomologist, is an adjunct professor in the department.

The Department of Entomology is ranked No. 1 in the country by the Chronicle of Higher Education, considered the top news and job-information source for college and university faculty members, administrators, and students.

When two FBI agents and a Bakersfield detective hauled a radiator and air filter — both splattered with insects — into the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology, they were not there to contribute to the museum's 7-million insect collection.

They wanted museum Director Lynn Kimsey, a professor of entomology, to identify the insects and their geographical home for an upcoming mass murder trial.

"I saw it as a puzzle to be solved," Kimsey said of the car parts embedded with several hundred insects. "I've never heard of anyone doing this."

Prosecutors from Kern County were alleging that Vincent Brothers, a former vice principal, drove a rented 2003 blue Dodge Neon from Ohio to California, where he killed five members of his family. The defense argued that the car had never left the Ohio area.

The Kern County Superior Court trial began in Bakersfield on Feb. 22 and ended May 15, with the jury convicting the 44-year-old Brothers of five counts of first-degree murder in the July 2003 shooting and stabbing deaths of his estranged wife, three children and mother-in-law. On May 29, the jury recommended the death sentence. Formal sentencing is scheduled for August.

In a recent telephone interview, Lisa Green, the deputy district attorney who prosecuted the case, described Kimsey as "an excellent witness and extremely knowledgeable."

"From the prosecution's point of view, half of the battle is being able to have witnesses knowledgeable in their field and the ability to explain that knowledge," Green said, noting that Kimsey is not only an expert in her field but a teacher.

"She taught me about the insects so I could understand the field and feel familiar enough to cross-examine their (defense) witnesses," Green added. "Her help was invaluable."

Kimsey described the experience as "interesting but terrifying."

"I didn't know anything about the court case," she added. "I couldn't even identify the defendant when I entered the courtroom."

In April 2004, Bakersfield police had arrested Brothers on suspicion of committing the murders. Brothers had been an employee of the Bakersfield City School District since 1989, and vice principal of Fremont Elementary School since 1996.

Brothers said he was in Columbus, Ohio, at the time of the murders. But the prosecution successfully argued that he caught a flight from California to Ohio, rented a car, and then drove to Bakersfield to kill his family.

"The insect evidence corroborated with the mileage on the vehicle, which had to have been driven west," Green said in the recent telephone interview.

Kimsey, one of 137 witnesses called to testify in the internationally publicized case, told the court that several insect species picked from the car parts are found only in the West and one was abundant in California. They included a large grasshopper, a paper wasp and two "true bugs." (A true bug is a wingless or four-winged insect in the order Hemiptera, with mouthparts adapted for piercing and sucking.)

The grasshopper is found in the Great Plains and the eastern slope of the Rockies. The paper wasp's territory is west of the 100th meridian, with California as "its center of abundance," Kimsey pointed out during the trial. In addition, she said that the two true bugs are also found only in the West: "Both are found in Southern California, Arizona and Utah."

She recalled that when she and senior museum scientist Steve Heydon picked off the insects from the car parts — it took them seven or eight hours, "We found no butterflies — no painted ladies, no sulphur butterflies. That indicated to us that the car wasn't driven during the day, but at night.

"The insects we found were consistent with two major routes to get to California from the East," said Kimsey, adding that court testimony revealed "4,500 unaccounted-for miles" on the rental car.

During her five-hour testimony, illustrated with a PowerPoint presentation, the UC Davis entomologist showed the distribution of the insects on a U.S. map, and compared insect photos from the car parts with specimens from the Bohart Museum.

Kimsey identified the large grasshopper by its leg, comparing the size, coloration and markings to a specimen at the museum. She testified that the hind legs of the grasshopper "help us identify" the species. The size of the large leg (red with black markings) indicated that the grasshopper measured "close to two inches long."

"The jury seemed very interested in what I had to say," Kimsey said.

Following her testimony, the defense called four entomologists to counter her evidence — three from Purdue University and one from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"The defense tried to make a case that insects are easily distributed," Kimsey said. They also questioned her expertise in diagnostics, systematics, field work and publications.

But Green, the prosecutor, said it was evident that the defense witnesses did not have "near the expertise or credentials" of Kimsey.

She was trained by world-renowned UC Davis entomologist Richard M. Bohart, who passed away earlier this year and who founded the Bohart Museum in 1946.

Today, the Bohart is one of the country's largest insect museums, and director Kimsey has identified insects for more than 30 years. She manages the insect diagnostic service on the UC Davis campus (through the Department of Entomology). The author of some 90 publications, she focuses her research on the biology and evolution of insects; biogeography of insects; functional morphology, dealing with the form and structure of insects; and systematics, or the science of classification.

But, she pointed out, "I've never been to a criminal court before. It was nothing like what Hollywood portrays it. It was all seriousness. The judge tolerated little off-track behavior."

Even so, Kimsey suspects that she and the Bohart Museum will wing their way back into the courtroom again.

"This may open up a whole new path for us," she said.

Resource: See Wikipedia entry