- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The themes range from dragonflies to parasitoids to moths, in addition to the annual Biodiversity Museum Day and UC Davis Picnic Day. Most of the Bohart Museum open houses take place from 1 to 4 p.m. except for “Moth Night.”
The schedule:
Sunday, Sept. 20, 1 to 4 p.m.: “Thar Be Dragon (flies)”
Saturday, Dec. 5, 1 to 4 p.m.: “Keep Calm and Insect On.”
Sunday, Jan. 10 from 1 to 4 p.m.: Parasitoid Palooza II
Saturday, Feb. 13: Biodiversity Museum Day
Saturday, April 16, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.: UC Davis Picnic Day
Saturday, July 30, 8 to 11 p.m.: “Celebrate Moths.”
The special weekend hours are free and open to the public. Families are encouraged to attend. The museum is located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, corner of LaRue Road and Crocker Lane, University of California, Davis.
The Bohart Museum, directed by Lynn Kimsey, professor of entomology at UC Davis, 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.
Special attractions include a “live” petting zoo, featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas. Visitors are invited to hold the insects and photograph them.
The museum's gift shop, open year around, includes T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.
The Bohart Museum's regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. The museum is closed to the public on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays and on major holidays. Admission is free.
More information on the Bohart Museum is available by contacting (530) 752-0493 or email bmuseum@ucdavis.edu. Tabatha Yang tabyang@ucdavis.edu) does public education and outreach and conducts groups tours.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Smith, who curates the 400,000 butterfly and moth collection at the Bohart Museum, will be honored Friday, Oct. 2 at the college's Award of Distinction ceremony in the UC Davis Activities and Recreation Center (ARC) Pavilion.
“Alumni, students, staff and faculty will gather to celebrate the contributions made by our college,” said coordinator Carolyn Cloud. “This year the college will present the Award of Distinction to seven outstanding individuals who have made significant contributions to our college's success.”
The other 2015 recipients are Jacqueline Beckley, Chuck Nichols and Tony Smith, alumni awards; Chris van Kessel, faculty; David Ginsburg, staff, and John Meyer, friend. The ceremony begins at 5:30 and will be followed by a reception and farmers' market from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. See http://collegecelebration.ucdavis.edu.
Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum and UC Davis professor of entomology, nominated Smith for the award. “You could not ask for a better friend than Jeff Smith,” she said, noting that he has “brought us international acclaim and saved us $160,000 through donations of specimens and materials, identification skills and his professional woodworking skills. This does not include the thousands of hours he has donated in outreach programs that draw attention to the museum, the college and the university.”
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!”
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.”
“As if this weren't enough, Jeff has made many other contributions to the museum. He donated his brother's collection and library when his brother died unexpectedly. He and his wife have made financial contributions towards the museum's endowment, and he donates other materials and specimens he collects on various collecting trips in the U.S. and overseas.”
Lauding Smith's “phenomenal knowledge of urban insect and spiders,” Kimsey said: “We often go to him with questions we get from the public and from colleagues. He volunteers for our weekend open houses as often as he can, as well as the UC Davis Biodiversity Museum Day in February and UC Davis Picnic Day in April. Few volunteers, faculty, students or staff work as well with the public as Jeff does. He has a wonderfully engaging way of talking to children and adults, and he knows just how to inspire and educate every age group. It's awesome to watch.”
“Overall, Jeff has made major contributions to the Bohart Museum of Entomology, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and UC Davis in his work with the museum collections and his tremendous public outreach and education efforts,” Kimsey concluded. “For him it's a labor of love, for us he's the best thing that ever happened.”
Smith, a resident of Rocklin, is not only a Bohart associate but a member of the Bohart Museum Society and the Lepidopterists' Society. Of his work, he puts it this way: “Entomology is my passion and the Bohart Museum is my cause.”
The Bohart Museum 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.
Special attractions include a “live” petting zoo, featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas. Visitors are invited to hold the insects and photograph them. The museum's gift shop, open year around, includes T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.
The Bohart Museum's regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. The museum is closed to the public on Fridays and on major holidays. Admission is free. Open houses, focusing on specific themes, are held on weekends throughout the academic year.
More information on the Bohart Museum is available by contacting (530) 752-0493 or Tabatha Yang, education and public outreach coordinator at tabyang@ucdavis.edu
Related Link:
Spreading Wings: The Amazing Work of Bohart Museum Associate Jeff Smith
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Find out at the Bohart Museum of Entomology open house from 1 to 4 p.m., Sunday, May 17 in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building on Crocker Lane.
The theme is "Name That Bug! How About Bob?"
Officials at the Bohart Museum and the California Department of Food and Agriculture will explain how insects are named. There also will be family arts-and-crafts activities. The event is free and open to the public.
The Bohart Museum sponsors a nonprofit biolegacy program, an opportunity to name an insect after you or a loved one. This is a lasting dedication and will help support future research and discovery at the Bohart, said Lynn Kimsey, museum director and a professor of entomology at UC Davis.
For example, there's a new wasp species named “The Bockler Wasp,” thanks to a concerted drive to memorialize a beloved science teacher, and the taxonomy work of the Bohart Museum and the BioLegacy Program.
When award-winning biology teacher Donald “Doc Boc” Bockler of Arlington (Mass.) High School, died at age 65 of an apparent heart attack on Sept. 2, 2008 at his home, two of his former students from the Class of 1993--Tabatha Bruce Yang of the Bohart Museum and Margaret Dredge Moore of Arlington--launched a fundraising drive to name an insect after him.
They selected a newly discovered species in the genus Lanthanomyia and sought the name, Lanthanomyia bockleri.
Senior museum scientist Heydon recently published his work on Lanthanomyia bockleri Heydon in Zootaxa, a worldwide mega-journal for zoological taxonomists and the name is now official.
“Once an article goes through the scientific review process and is published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, the name of the new species is official and immortalized in the scientific literature,” explained Kimsey.
Kimsey described species-naming as “a unique, lasting form of dedication” and “a great honor both for the person giving the name and for the individual or other honoree whose name is being given to the species.”
Heydon said Lanthanomyia is a genus whose species are restricted to central and southern Chile and adjacent parts of Argentina. The new species is found in the Nothofagus forests of Patagonian Chile, including Chiloe Island. It belongs to a family of parasitic wasps called the Pteromalidae. “Unlike other related species, this one has a unique dorsal attachment of the head to the thorax. If you see a specimen of Lanthanomyia with the neck attaching close to the top of the head, you know it is bockleri,” Heydon said. “Adults are reared from galls on Nothofagus and are thought to be parasites of gall-forming weevils.”
“Donald Bockler was fascinated by evolution and nature and he would have been proud,” said Yang, education and outreach coordinator at the Bohart Museum. Like many other Bockler students, she credits him for influencing her decision to pursue a career in science.
For more information, and to get a list of species available for naming, contact bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
One of the displays at Sunday's open house will be by entomologist Jeff Smith, associate at the Bohart Museum, who will be displaying monarch butterflies in various stages of pinning. A mishap occurred at an unknown California wedding: 300 monarchs were to be released but all perished in the box. "Now we are using them for a static display (as opposed to hands-on)," Smith said.
The Bohart Museum 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.
Special attractions include a “live” petting zoo, featuring Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking sticks and tarantulas. Visitors are invited to hold the insects and photograph them.
The museum's gift shop, open year around, includes T-shirts, sweatshirts, books, jewelry, posters, insect-collecting equipment and insect-themed candy.
The Bohart Museum's regular hours are from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 5 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays. The museum is closed to the public on Fridays and on major holidays. Admission is free. Open houses, focusing on specific themes, are held on weekends throughout the academic year.
The last open house of the year is "Moth Night," set from 8 to 11 p.m., Saturday, July 18 on the grounds just outside the Bohart Museum. Participants will learn how to collect moths and identify them.
More information on the Bohart Museum is available by contacting (530) 752-0493 or Tabatha Yang, education and public outreach coordinator at tabyang@ucdavis.edu
/span>- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The event will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a half-acre bee garden located on Bee Biology Road next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility. A public ceremony will be held from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m.
Michael Parrella, professor and chair of the department, will welcome the crowd at 10:30 a.m. Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology, was the interim chair of the department and directed and organized the installation of the garden. It was planted in 2009, thanks to a generous donation from Häagen-Dazs. More than 50 percent of their ice cream flavors depend on pollination.
Raj Brahmbhatt, associate brand manager of Häagen-Dazs Ice Cream at Nestle USA, Dreyer's Ice Cream company, will speak at 10:50 a.m. on “What the Haven Means to Us.”
Christine Casey, manager of the haven, will discuss “What Your Donations Mean to the Haven” at 11:15. A catered donor luncheon will follow at the UC Davis Conference Center, across from the Mondavi Center.
Public events at the haven through 2 p.m. wiill include discussions on how to observe and identify bees, what to plant to help bees, how to use native bee houses. There also will be beekeeping demonstrations and garden tours. The garden is open to the public from dawn to dusk every day. Admission is free. Tours (a nominal fee is charged) can be arranged with Casey at cacasey@ucdavis.edu. To book a tour, access the website and click on "Visit Us."
An article on the Laidlaw bee research published on the UC Agriculture and Natural Resources website and written by communications specialist Kathy Keatley Garvey of the Department of Entomology and Nematology, drew the attention of Häagen-Dazs and led to the donation. The article featured the work of bee-breeder geneticist Susan Cobey. Kimsey suggested that the funds be used for a public bee garden and the funding of a Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Fellow, which was awarded to insect virus researcher Michelle Flenniken, then a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UC San Francisco.
A Sausalito team--landscape architects Donald Sibbett and Ann F. Baker, interpretative planner Jessica Brainard and exhibit designer Chika Kurotaki--won the international design competition.
The judges were Professor Kimsey; founding garden manager Melissa "Missy" Borel (now Missy Borel Gable), then of the California Center for Urban Horticulture (CCUH); David Fujino, executive director of CCUH: Aaron Majors, construction department manager, Cagwin & Dorward Landscape Contractors, based in Novato; Diane McIntyre, senior public relations manager, Häagen-Dazs ice cream; Heath Schenker, professor of environmental design, UC Davis; Jacob Voit, sustainability manager and construction project manager, Cagwin and Dorward Landscape Contractors; and Kathy Keatley Garvey, communications specialist, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology and a bee and garden enthusiast. Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen, now retired, was also instrumental in the founding of the garden.
Others who had a key role in the founding and "look" of the garden included the UC Davis Art/Science Fusion Program, founded and directed by the duo of entomologist/artist Diane Ullman, professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, and self-described "rock artist" Donna Billick. The art in the garden is the work of their students, ranging from those in Entomology 1 class to community residents. Seventeen-year-old Boy Scout Derek Tully of Troop 111 planned, organized and built a state-of-the-art fence around the garden as his Eagle Scout project. His father, Larry Tully, and troop members assisted. The project saved the department at least $30,000.
Melissa Borel Gable served as the founding manager of the garden. Under her direction and the work of 19 volunteers, the garden was named one of the top garden destinations in the Sacramento/Yolo area. (See http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=10205) The founding gardeners, in addition to Gable were Davis residents Mary Patterson, Tyng Tyng Cheng, Kristen Kolb, Nancy Stone, Marion London, Judy Hills, Laura Westrup, Kathy Olson, Nyla Weibe, Gary Zamzow, Randy Beaton, Janet Thatcher, Kate McDonald and Kili Bong, and her son, Evan Marczak; and Woodland residents Laurie Hildebrandt and Joe Frankenfield. The 19 volunteers chalked up 5,229 hours of service between May 2010 and Feb. 15, 2013. At the $10 minimum wage, that would have amounted to $52,290. The volunteers completed their duties at the haven on Feb. 15.
Kimsey was singled out for her work in founding and directing the installation of the garden when the Pacific Branch of the Entomological Society of America honored her and four others--"The Bee Team"--with the 2013 outstanding team award.
The history of the garden is on the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology website at http://bit.ly/1OAtD6W. The new haven website is at http://hhbhgarden.ucdavis.edu/welcome. It includes a list of plants in the haven, by common name and botanical name; a list of donors and how to donate.
A private opening of the garden occurred Oct. 16, 2009 and a grand opening celebration took place Sept. 11, 2010.
Native pollinator specialist Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology, monitors the garden for bees and has found more than 80 species. Both he and Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen had an integral part in the beginnings of the garden.
Among the newest major donors is the California State Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, which provided bee research funds (Brian Johnson lab), and funds for the haven. See donor list of those who have given $1000 or more.
The timeline:
Feb. 19, 2008
Häagen-Dazs Donation to UC Davis
Dec. 8, 2008
Häagen-Dazs Launches Bee Garden Design Contest
Aug. 6, 2008
Insect Virus Researcher Michelle Flenniken Named Häagen-Dazs Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Davis
Feb. 26, 2009
Sausalito Team Wins Design Competition
Aug. 6, 2009
Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven Site Preparation
Aug. 13, 2009
Bee Biology Website to Be Launched
Aug. 13, 2009
Thinking Outside the Box
Sept. 15, 2009
Campus Buzzway: Wildflowers
Dec. 15, 2009
Bee Biology Website Lauded
2010
June 6, 2010
Grand Opening Celebration of Honey Bee Garden
July 15, 2010
Art Is Where the Community Is; Blending Science with Art in the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven
July 30, 2010
More Than 50 Bee Species Found in Haven: Robbin Thorp (Now there's more than 80 and counting!)
Aug. 25, 2010
Donna Billick: Miss Bee Haven
Aug. 11, 2011
What the Signs Tell Us in the UC Davis Honey Bee Garden
Aug. 24, 2011
Royal Visit to Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility
April 11, 2012
Brian Fishback: Spreading the Word about Honey Bees
Aug. 26, 2013
Eagle Scout Project: Fence Around the Bee Garden
Sept. 11 2012
A Fence to Behold
2013
April 25, 2013
UC Davis Bee Team Wins Major Award
Aug. 1, 2013
Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven Place to Be
With photo of founding volunteers
For more information on the garden or to donate, see the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven website.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
DAVIS--John Lane, an adjunct professor at California State University and a California-registered professional geologist, will speak on “The Hargy Caldera and Surrounding Watersheds Project: West New Britain, Papua New Guinea” at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar on Wednesday, April 22.
The seminar will be in Room 122 of Briggs Hall from 12:10 to 1 p.m. He will be introduced by his host, Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and professor of entomology at UC Davis.
“The Hargy Caldera and Surrounding Watersheds Project was developed in 2007 to discover and describe the unique features of the Lake Hargy/Nakanai Mountains of West New Britain, Papua New Guinea and to help promote world heritage status to this region,” Lane said in his abstract. “The project's focus for this year, 2015, will be fivefold: continued mapping of the Hargy Caldera, including forest density and diversity studies, continued swabbing for the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, continued sampling of herpetofauna, collection of butterflies, and lastly, sampling of avifauna.”
“Although not a primary focus, mammal and invertebrate surveys are also anticipated," he said. "In the coming years, we hope to establish a long-term research station at Lake Hargy. The research station will allow us to continue our collaboration with California State University, Chico, potentially with University of California, Davis and the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG). With our collaboration we hope to inspire, empower, environmental science students the opportunity to study abroad. Through this opportunity, students will gain both practical field experience and a more comprehensive international perspective, both environmentally and socially.”
Lane holds an master of science degree in geoscience and a bachelor's degree in physical science both from California State University, Chico. He is a Qualified Storm Water Pollution Prevention Plan Developer.
Lane has more than 23 years experience working as a geologist dealing with issues ranging from air sampling to water rights. He is the principal scientist for Chico Environmental Science and Planning, an environmental consulting firm based in downtown Chico. He also is the founder of the Subterranean Explorers, a group of scientists and explorers who have conducted research expeditions that have led to the creation of conservation areas in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. John lives in Chico with his wife, daughter and son.
The seminar will be video-recorded for later posting on UCTV.
See remainder of the departmental seminars, which are coordinated by nematologist/professor Steve Nadler.
Related Link:
Feature story on John Lane, Sacramento News & Review