Senior Editor / Interactive Learning Developer
UC ANR Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program
Saturday, Aug. 20, is National Honey Bee Day. Observed on the third Saturday every August, this day educates people about the importance of honey bees and promotes the work of beekeepers.
Various insects, birds, and other animals pollinate plants. Bees, especially honey bees, are the most vital for pollinating food crops. Many California crops rely on bees to pollinate their flowers and ensure a good yield of seeds, fruit, and nuts. Pesticides, especially insecticides, can harm bees if they are applied or allowed to drift to plants that are flowering.
Our mission at the University of California Agricultural and Natural Resources (UC ANR), Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program (UC IPM) is to protect the environment by reducing risks caused by pest management practices. UC IPM developed Bee Precaution Pesticide Ratings to help pest managers make an informed decision about how to protect bees when choosing or applying pesticides.
The bee precaution ratings are based on the reported effects of a pesticide's active ingredient on adult honey bees or their brood. You can find and compare ratings for active ingredients including acaricides (miticides), bactericides, fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides.
Ratings fall into three categories. Red, or rated I, pesticides should not be applied or allowed to drift to plants that are flowering. Plants include the crop AND nearby weeds. Yellow, or rated II, pesticides should not be applied or allowed to drift to plants that are flowering, except when the application is made between sunset and midnight if allowed by the pesticide label and regulations. Finally, green, or rated III, pesticides have no bee precautions, except when required by the pesticide label or regulations.
It is important to note that the bee precaution pesticide ratings are not the pollinator protection statements on the pesticide label.
Each crop in the UC Pest Management Guidelines has links to the bee precaution ratings and provides guidance on how to reduce bee poisoning from pesticides. For more information on protecting bees from pesticides, see UC IPM's Protecting Natural Enemies and Pollinators, and use the Bee Precaution Pesticide Ratings.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Butterflies and moths can't fly if you rub the scales off their wings, right?
Earwigs crawl into your ears and then into your brain, right?
Wrong. Those are some of the myths surrounding insects and ones that the UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology will dispel at its open house from 1 to 4 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 23, in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge building, Crocker Lane.
The Bohart also will dispel myths about spiders (arachnids), including
- Brown recluse spiders are found in California
- Daddy long-leg spiders are very venomous, but their mouths are too small to bite us.
- We swallow/eat a significant amount of spiders/insects in our sleep.
The open house, free and open to the public, is the second in a series of nine open houses during the 2014-2015 academic year.
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. Facepainting will be among the family-oriented activities.
The museum's gift shop (on location and online) 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 insect 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 remaining schedule of open houses:
- Saturday, Dec. 20: “Insects and Art,” 1 to 4 p.m.
- Sunday, Jan. 11: “Parasitoid Palooza,” 1 to 4 p.m.
- Sunday, Feb. 8: “Biodiversity Museum Day,” noon to 4 p.m.
- Saturday, March 14: “Pollination Nation,” 1 to 4 p.m.
- Saturday, April 18: UC Davis Picnic Day, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Sunday, May 17: “Name That Bug! How About Bob?” 1 to 4 p.m.
- Saturday, July 18: “Moth Night,” 8 to 11 p.m.
More information is available by contacting (530) 752-0493 or Tabatha Yang, education and public outreach coordinator at tabyang@ucdavis.edu
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
The research, “Gradual Molecular Evolution of a Sex Determination Switch in Honeybees through Incomplete Penetrance of Femaleness,” is published in the December edition of Current Biology. The research shows that five amino acid differences separate males from females.
The lead author, Martin Beye, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Duesseldorf, Germany, was Page’s former UC Davis postdoctoral researcher. Bee breeder-geneticist Michael “Kim” Fondrk provided the genetic material from crosses using Page’s bees that he tends at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis.
“The story goes back to Johann Dzierson in the mid 1800s through Mendel, through Harry Laidlaw to me and to my former postdoc at Davis, Martin Beye,” Page said.
“Much of the work was done at UC Davis beginning in 1990,” Page said. "From 1999-2000, Martin Beye was a Fyodor Lynen Fellow in my lab funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. During that year he began the sequencing and characterization of the csd gene; the paper was eventually published as a cover article in Cell."
Said Fondrk: “This project was a long time in making; it began soon after our Cell paper was published in 2003. First we needed to assemble variation for alleles at the sex locus, by collecting drones from many different, presumably unrelated queens, and mating one drone each through an independently reared set of queens using instrumental insemination (which was Fondrk's task). "Then a second set of crosses was made to identify and isolate individual sex alleles. The progeny that resulted from this cross were taken to Germany where Martin Beye’s team began the monumental task of sequencing the sex determination region in the collected samples.”
Silesian monk Johann Dzierson began studying the first genetic mechanism for sex determination in the mid-1800s. Dzierson knew that royal jelly determines whether the females will be queen bees or honey bee colonies, but he wondered about the males.
Dzierson believed that the males or drones were haploid – possessing one set of chromosomes, a belief confirmed in the 1900s with the advent of the microscope. In other words, the males, unlike the females, came from unfertilized eggs.
“However, how this system of haplodiploid sex determination ultimately evolved at a molecular level has remained one of the most important questions in developmental genetics,” Coulombe pointed out in her news release.
The collaborators resolved the last piece of the puzzle.
“Once again, the studies by Dr. Rob Page and his colleagues have unraveled another mystery of honey bee development,” commented Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, who was not involved in the study but knows the work of many of the collaborators. “It would be interesting if someone investigated the same type of sexual dimorphism in other hymenopterans to determine if they all use the same, ancient-based mechanism.”
The authors studied 14 natural sequence variants of the complementary sex determining switch (csd gene), for 76 genotypes of honey bees.
“However, the questions of which alleles were key, how they worked together and in what combinations and why this system evolved were left unanswered, though tantalizing close. This compelled the current team of collaborators to step back to review what actually constitutes an allele.”
Page was quoted in the news release: “There has to be some segment of that gene that is responsible in this allelic series, where if you have two different coding sequences in that part of the gene you end up producing a female. So we asked how different do two alleles have to be? Can you be off one or two base pairs or does it always have to be the same set of sequences? We came up with a strategy to go in and look at these 18-20 alleles and find out what regions of these genes are responsible among these variants.”
“In this process,” Page said, “we also had to determine if there are intermediate kinds of alleles and discover how they might have evolved.”
“What the authors found,” wrote Coulombe, “was that at least five amino acid differences can control allelic differences to create femaleness through the complementary sex determiner (csd) gene – the control switch.”
Page explained: “We discovered that different amounts of arginine, serine and proline affect protein binding sites on the csd gene, which in turn lead to different conformational states, which then lead to functional changes in the bees – the switch that determines the shift from female to not female.”
The authors also discovered a natural evolutionary intermediate that showed only three amino acid differences spanned the balance between lethality and induced femaleness, Coulombe wrote. The findings suggest that that incomplete penetrance may be the mechanism by which new molecular switches can gradually and adaptively evolve.
Other co-authors included Christine Seelmann and Tanja Gempe of the University of Duesseldorf; Martin Hasslemann, Institute of Genetics at the University of Cologne, Germany; and Xavier Bekmans with Université Lille, n France. Grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft supported their work.
Page, who studies the evolution of complex social behavior in honey bees, from genes to societies, received his doctorate in entomology from UC Davis in 1980, and served as an assistant professor at Ohio State University before joining the UC Davis Department of Entomology in 1989. He chaired the department for five years, from 1999 to 2004 when ASU recruited him as the founding director and dean of the School of Life Sciences, an academic unit within College of Liberal Arts and Science (CLAS).
Page was selected the university provost in December. He had earlier served as the vice provost.
Recognized as one of the world’s foremost honey bee geneticists, Page is a highly cited entomologist who has authored more than 230 research papers and articles centered on Africanized bees, genetics and evolution of social organization, sex determination and division of labor in insect societies. His work on the self-organizing regulatory networks of honey bees is featured in his new book, The Spirit of the Hive: The Mechanisms of Social Evolution, published in June 2013 by Harvard University Press.
Garvey also won the top award (the gold award) in two categories: writing for newspapers and writing for a specialized publication.
In addition, she took home a silver award for her feature photo of a honey bee in flight.
Garvey received the awards at the ACE awards ceremony on June 12 in Denver, Colo.
Judges scored the writing entries on content, writing quality, creativity and writing style and awarded one gold, one silver and one bronze in each category.
“You deserve much credit and recognition for your excellent work,” wrote ACE president-elect Elaine Edwards, news media coordinator, Kansas State University. The awards program drew 233 entries.
The best newswriting award was for Garvey's work on "Saving Franklin's Bumble Bee," about UC Davis emeritus professor Robbin Thorp who is monitoring the endangered bumble bee, found only in a small area of southern Oregon and northern California.
The best writing-for-a-specialized publication award was for her work titled “Miss Bee Haven,” about Davis artist Donna Billick's six-foot-long bee sculpture in the Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven, a half-acre bee friendly garden next to the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis.
The judge of “Saving Franklin's Bumble Bee,” wrote: “Great story. It takes the humble bumble bee disappearance story and reduces it down to a specific local level. I'll bet a lot of people didn't know that the Franklin bee is a specific genus of bee—but they do now. Way cool. The writing was great and the words just flowed so well throughout. I even learned something—and that's saying a lot from me. This is very well done.”
The judge of “Miss Bee Haven” wrote: “Very nice job in describing an art project destined to attract many people to learn more about the honey bee”
This is Garvey's fourth gold award from ACE in four years. A former newspaper editor and a UC Davis communicator since 1986, she is a writer-editor, photographer, news media specialist and web person in the Department of Entomology. In her leisure time, she writes the daily UC ANR blog, “Bug Squad,” which has tallied nearly two million hits since she began writing it in August 2008.
One of her passions is capturing macro images of insects, especially honey bees. Garvey, who grew up on a 300-acre dairy farm in Washington state and earned two degrees from Washington State University, is fascinated by insects, especially honey bees. Both her father and grandfather kept bees.
--Kathy Keatley Garvey
Communications specialist
UC Davis Department of Entomology
(530) 754-6894