- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The Bohart Museum of Entomology is sponsoring its fourth annual Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble Bee-of-the-Year Contest, which begins at 12:01, Jan. 1, 2024. The first person to photograph a bumble bee in either Yolo or Solano and email it to the sponsor, the Bohart Museum, will receive a coffee cup designed with the endangered Franklin's bumble bee, the bee that Thorp monitored on the California-Oregon border for decades.
Contest coordinator Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum, said the image must be taken in the wild and emailed to bmuseum@ucdavis.edu, with the time, date and place.
The contest memorializes Professor Thorp (1933-2019), a global authority on bees and a UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor of entomology, who died June 7, 2019 at age 85. A 30-year member of the UC Davis faculty, he retired in 1994 but continued working until several weeks before his death. Every year he looked forward to seeing the first bumble bee in the area.
The 2023 winner was Ria deGrassi of Davis, who spotted and videoed a black-tailed bumble bee Bombus melanopygus, foraging on a prized ceanothus plant on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 8 in her backyard in Davis.
“I was doing clean-up in my backyard after Saturday night's rain and a 50-plus mile-per-hour windstorm,” said de Grassi, now an agricultural policy consultant. “The wind had subsided to a breeze by then. As I walked past my Ray Hartman ceanothus—which I purchased from a UC Davis Arboretum plant sale years ago when I did a garden makeover to be pollinator-friendly—I noticed some extra-long ceanothus branches that needed to be pruned, including some with super-early blooming flowers.”
“I fumbled to retrieve my cell phone from my pocket to record, just to get in on the fun,” said de Grassi. “These bumbles dart around a lot, they don't stay put for photo ops.”
De Grassi knew Thorp from her professional work with the California Farm Bureau Federation and from her friendship with bee scientists Timothy Lawrence and Susan Cobey, formerly of UC Davis.
DeGrassi, a former director of federal policy, livestock, animal health and welfare for the California Farm Bureau Federation, credits the storm, the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden and her working relationships with bee scientists, including Thorp, as having a hand in either her find and/or her interest in plants and pollinators.
The three previous winners (2022 was a tie) each photographed a bumble bee in the 100-acre UC Davis Arboretum. Coincidentally, de Grassi bought her prized ceanothus at an Arboretum plant sale.
Postdoctoral researcher Charlie Casey Nicholson of the Neal Williams lab and the Elina Lastro Niño lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, won the 2021 contest by photographing a B. melanopygus at 3:10 p.m., Jan. 14 in a manzanita patch in the Arboretum.
UC Davis doctoral candidate Maureen Page of the Neal Williams lab and horticulturist Ellen Zagory, retired director of public horticulture for the Arboretum, tied for first in the 2022 contest by each photographing a bumble bee foraging on manzanita (Arctostaphylos) in the Arboretum at 2:30 p.m., Saturday, Jan. 1.
Page, who now holds a doctorate in entomology, photographed a B. melanopygus, while Zagory captured an image of the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii.
Thorp, a tireless advocate of pollinator species protection and conservation, co-authored two books in 2014, during his retirement: Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide (Princeton University,) and California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists (Heyday). Every year he looked forward to finding or seeing the first bumble bee in the area.
Thorp co-taught The Bee Course from 2002 to 2019. An intensive nine-day workshop affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and held annually at the Southwestern Research Station, Portal, Ariz., it draws participants from around the world, includkng conservation biologists, pollination ecologists, and other biologists who want to gain greater knowledge of the systematics and biology of bees.
For years, Thorp monitored Franklin's bumble bee, found only in a small range in Southern Oregon and Northern California, and now feared extinct. He last spotted it in 2006.
The bumble bee contest originated in 2012 with the "Bombus posse" of Thorp, Allan Jones, Gary Zamzow, Kim Chacon and Kathy Keatley Garvey, who engaged in a friendly contest to see who could find the first bumble bee of the year in the two-county area. The first bumble bee to emerge in the area is usually the black-tailed bumble bee. B. melanopygus, Thorp used to say. Another early bumble bee is the yellow-faced bumble bee, B. vosnesenskii.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The schedule:
Saturday, Jan. 20:
"Social Wasps," 1 to 4 p.m., featuring UC Davis distinguished professor Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum. She recently received the 2023 Exceptional Faculty Award from the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. Kimsey, a recognized authority on insect biodiversity, systematics and biogeography of parasitic wasps, urban entomology, civil forensic entomology, and arthropod-related industrial hygiene, is a 34-year member of the UC Davis entomology faculty. She has directed the Bohart Museum since 1990. She plans to retire in 2024. (See news story)
Saturday, Feb. 10:
13th Annual Biodiversity Museum Day, all day. Last year 13 UC Davis museums or collections participated: Arboretum and Public Garden, Bohart Museum of Entomology, Botanical Conservatory. California Raptor Center. Center for Plant Diversity, Department of Anthropology Museum, Marine Invertebrate Collection, Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology, Nematode Collection, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences Paleontology Collection, and Phaff Yeast Culture Collection.
"Grasshoppers, Crickets and Katydids." Talk and a question-and-answer forum from 1 to 2 p.m. Open museum, 2 to 4 p.m. Heading the event is UC Davis undergraduate student Sol Wantz, a senior majoring in entomology and a member o the lab of community ecologist and professor Neal Williams. She serve as president of the UC Davis Entomology Club.
110th UC Davis Picnic Day, all day. This is billed as the largest student-run event in the country. It is UC Davis' annual open house with hundreds of free and family friendly events. Entomology displays, exhibits and activities planned by the Department of Entomology and Nematology will be at the Bohart Museum and at Briggs Hall.
Sunday, May 19:
"Bees: Both Wild and Managed," 1 to 4 p.m. Presenters will include community ecologist Rachel Vannette, associate professor and vice chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
The Bohart Museum, founded in 1946, is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis campus. It houses a global collection of eight million insect specimens, plus a live petting zoo (including Madagascar hissing cockroaches, stick insects, and tarantulas) and a insect-themed gift shop, stocked with t-shirts, hoodies, jewelry, books, posters, pens, and more.
The Bohart Museum is open to the public Monday through Thursday. Casual walk-in hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and from 1 to 5 p.m. Pre-arranged tours (schools, scouts, UC classes) may also occur during these times. The museum will be closed for the winter holiday break, Dec. 23-Jan. 1. More information is on the website or by contacting bmuseum@ucdavis.edu. Tabatha Yang serves as the education and outreach coordinator, and Brennen Dyer as the collections manager.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It did: their research revealed how TSWV (family Tospoviridae, order Bunyavirales) packages its RNA genome, a crucial step in virus infection.
Their newly published research, “The Genome of a Bunyavirus Cannot be Defined at the Level of the Viral Particle But Only at the Scale of the Viral Population,” appears in the current edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The 18-member research team included scientists primarily from the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) at the Campus International de Baillarguet, Montpellier; Department of Entomology, University of Wisconsin; and the Department of Entomology and Nematology, University of California, Davis.
“Our work showed the genome of TSWV can only be defined at the population level, pointing at emerging properties when viral particles infect plants in groups,” said a key author Stéphane Blanc, research director of INRAE's Biology and Genetics of Plant-Pathogen Interactions. “As most virions contain an incomplete genome, TSWV is a multi-component viral system, where co-infection and complementation are key in the life cycle. These findings open a myriad of possibly distinct properties depending on the genetic composition of the group of virions co-infecting a cell.”
“The most challenging part of this work was to create a protocol reliably quantifying the two polarities of each segment,” said lead author Michel Yvon of INRAE. “The next important advance will be to demonstrate that co-infection of cells by a group of particles is key to the spread of infection.”
Ullman, an international authority on orthotospoviruses and one of the four main authors, took a sabbatical to work on the project. “My interest was in understanding how TSWV packaged its RNA genome,” she said. “While this sounds like a simple goal, it is quite complex because TSWV has negative sense and ambisense viral strands and many research tools common to studying other viruses, such as infectious clones were not available.”
“It was a delight to work with the fantastic team of scientists that Stéphane assembled, all very talented with skills in virology, cryoelectron microscopy and nanopore PCR,” Ullman commented. “I cannot imagine a more talented and diverse group of people to conduct this difficult work. I learned a great deal about virus purification from Michel Yvon, whose leadership, skills in virology, and patient teaching really moved our project forward."
German, professor emeritus and former chair of both the Departments of Plant Pathology and Entomology at the University of Wisconsin, died Aug. 27, 2023 at age 82.
“I am indebted to my husband, Jean-Marc Leininger who frequently drove me to the laboratory in Avignon where I was able to rear thousands of virus-infected plants and to store TSWV isolate,” Ullman added. “Jean-Marc not only transported me and my virus specimens, but also learned to mechanically inoculate plants and helped with every inoculation and virus harvest.”
UC Davis postdoctoral scholar Sulley Ben-Mahmoud of the Ullman lab was among the co-authors.
Funding was provided by grants from Montpellier University of Excellence (MUSE); Floriculture and Nursery Research Initiative, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS); and the Fulbright Scholar Program. The authors also acknowledged support from
- Santé des Plantes et Environnementor Plant Health and Environment (SPE)
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)
- Institute of Research for Development (IRD)
- Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM)
- Centre for International Cooperation in Agronomic Research for Development (CIRAD)
- Plant Health Institute of Montpelier (PHIM)
Ullman noted the importance of the research in her Fulbright application: “Sustainable management of insect-transmitted pathogens is a key concern for food production in France and the United States. Both countries grow many of the same crops and growers face similar challenges from insect-transmitted plant viruses. Current management strategies rely heavily on pesticides that may cause significant health and environmental concerns, including damage to bees and other pollinators, as shown with neonicotinoid pesticides. Clearly, better knowledge about these insect-transmitted viral systems…has potential to reduce pesticide use by providing novel and innovative technologies to manage orthotospoviruses and thrips in France and the United States.”
Ullman, a former chair of the Department of Entomology and a former associate dean of the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, anticipates strong research relationships between UC Davis and Montpellier that will lead to grant applications for international research and scholarly exchange opportunities for scientists, students, and post-doctoral scholars.
Significance
In their significance statement, the authors wrote: “Bunyaviruses infect animals, plants, fungi, and protists. Despite their importance, fundamental aspects of their biology as basic as the definition of their genome remain elusive. The viral genome consists of several negative or ambisense RNA segments, and virions often miss segments and/or package complementary strands. We formally quantify this heterogeneity on the species Tomato spotted wilt orthotospovirus. Within individual virus particles, the number, the identity, and the polarity of the segments are widely variable. In contrast, we show that a stable genetic composition is an emerging property of the viral population, each of the RNA segments/polarities accumulating reproducibly at a specific frequency. This resembles the genome formula of multipartite viruses, suggesting that bunyaviruses may also function as multicomponent viral systems.”
Their abstract: “Bunyaviruses are enveloped negative or ambisense single-stranded RNA viruses with a genome divided into several segments. The canonical view depicts each viral particle packaging one copy of each genomic segment in one polarity named the viral strand. Several opposing observations revealed nonequal ratios of the segments, uneven number of segments per virion, and even packaging of viral complementary strands. Unfortunately, these observations result from studies often addressing other questions, on distinct viral species, and not using accurate quantitative methods. Hence, what RNA segments and strands are packaged as the genome of any bunyavirus remains largely ambiguous. We addressed this issue by first investigating the virion size distribution and RNA content in populations of the tomato spotted wilt virus (TSWV) using microscopy and tomography. These revealed heterogeneity in viral particle volume and amount of RNA content, with a surprising lack of correlation between the two. Then, the ratios of all genomic segments and strands were established using RNA sequencing and qRT-PCR. Within virions, both plus and minus strands (but no mRNA) are packaged for each of the three L, M, and S segments, in reproducible nonequimolar proportions determined by those in total cell extracts. These results show that virions differ in their genomic content but together build up a highly reproducible genetic composition of the viral population. This resembles the genome formula described for multipartite viruses, with which some species of the order Bunyavirales may share some aspects of the way of life, particularly emerging properties at a supravirion scale.”
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Nieh will present his seminar at 4:10 p.m., Monday, Dec. 4 in Room 122 of Briggs Hall and also on Zoom. The Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672
"Karl von Frisch referred to the waggle dance as the 'magic well' for the insights that it provides not only on honey bees, but on the general cognitive complexity that social insects are capable of," Nieh writes in his abstract. "New research demonstrates that the neurotransmitter, dopamine, the 'pleasure molecule' plays a similar hedonic role in honey bees as it does in many vertebrates, regulating the perception of danger and the anticipation of food rewards as revealed in the excitatory waggle dance and the associated, inhibitory stop signal. I will also discuss new data showing that the honey bee waggle dance is partially learned and has elements that may be culturally transmitted. Together, these findings, demonstrate that the waggle dance can teach us a great deal about shared cognitive mechanisms and the importance of social learning across taxa."
In an article titled "Unlocking Secrets of the Honeybee Dance Language--Bees Learn and Culturally Transmit Their Communication Skills," and published March 9, 2023 in The Conversation, Nieh described the waggle dance as "one of the most complicated examples of nonhuman communication. They can tell each other were to find resources such as food, water, or nest sites with a physical 'waggle dance.' this dance conveys the This dance conveys the direction, distance and quality of a resource to the bee's nestmates."
Nieh related exactly how the bees perform the waggle dance. "Essentially, the dancer points recruits in the correct direction and tells them how far to go by repeatedly circling around in a figure eight pattern centered around a waggle run, in which the bee waggles its abdomen as it moves forward. Dancers are pursued by potential recruits, bees that closely follow the dancer, to learn where to go to find the communicated resource."
"Longer waggle runs communicate greater distances," Nieh wrote, "and the waggle angle communicates direction. For higher-quality resources such as sweeter nectar, dancers repeat the waggle run more times and race back faster after each waggle run."
Nieh noted that "The Greek historian Herodotus reported over 2,000 years ago on a misguided forbidden experiment in which two children were prevented from hearing human speech so that a king could discover the true, unlearned language of human beings.
"Scientists now know that human language requires social learning and interaction with other people, a property shared with multiple animal languages. But why should humans and other animals need to learn a language instead of being born with this knowledge, like many other animal species?"
Nieh went on to point out that "This question fascinates me and my colleagues and is the basis for our recent paper published in the journal Science. As a biologist, I have spent decades studying honeybee communication and how it may have evolved."
Nieh received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1991 and his doctorate from Cornell University in 1997. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship funded by NSF-NAT0 (National Science Foundation, North Atlantic Treaty Organization) at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He served as a Harvard Junior Fellow from 1998-2000
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.
Resources:
- Social Signal Learning of the Waggle Dance in Honey Bees, March 9, 2023, Science
- Bees Can Teach Their Young to Dance, March 9, 2023, Washington Post
- The Waggle Dance, PBS documentary on YouTube
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Dag will present his seminar at 4:10 p.m. in Room 122 of Briggs Hall. It also will be on Zoom: the Zoom link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/
"Tree crops belonging to the Rosaceae, such as almond, pear, apple, and sweet cherry, depend on cross-pollination by insects to set fruit," Dag says in his abstract. "The primary pollinator of the crops is the honey bee (Apis mellifera). However, due to harsh climatic conditions during flowering, limited movement of bees between cultivars, low preference of the bees for flowers of the target crop, and limited overlap in flowering between the cultivars, pollination is a primary factor limiting yield. Our group has tested multiple approaches to mitigate this problem: Using 'Pollen dispensers,' sequential introduction of beehives to the orchards, selection of honeybee strains with higher preference for the target crop, introduction of bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies and phosphorous fertilization to increase nectar secretion and improve crop-flower attractiveness. I will summarize the effects of those methods on fruit set and yield in apples, almonds, and pears."
A native of Moshav Lachish, Israel, Dag received his bachelor's degree (1990) and master's degree (1992) in life sciences at the Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University. His master's thesis: "Improving the Honey Bee Efficiency of Melon Pollination in Greenhouses." He obtained his doctorate in agriculture at the Horticulture, Faculty of Agriculture at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His thesis: "Pollenizers, Pollinators and Pollination in Mango." He held postdoctoral positions at both Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Dag's research interests include fruit tree physiology, olive biology and cultivation, reproductive biology of fruit trees, crop pollination, pomology in semi-arid conditions and "developing guava as an export crop."
He served as an Extension specialist in beekeeping from 1991 to 2003 for the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture.
Seminar coordinator is Brian Johnson, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. For Zoom technical issues, he may be reached at brnjohnson@ucdavis.edu. The list of seminars is posted here.