Ongoing research

Have you seen me? Can you identify me? No, you're a skipper, but which one are you? The colorful brown skipper butterfly that touched down on our Jupiter's Beard in Vacaville, Calif., on May 17 puzzled us.

Every year growers get together to learn what is being done in the citrus research world that could affect their operations. This June, University of California and the Citrus Research Board are bringing some good talks to three different growing areas.

providing some advantage to the farmer. Frequently, these are new fertilizer mixes presented as proprietary cocktails promoted and dispensed with promises of a multitude of profitable (yet improbable) benefits to the buyer.

Yes, bears raid honey bee colonies. But it's primarily for the bee brood, not the honey. The brood provides the protein, and the honey, the carbohydrates. For beekeepers and commercial queen bee breeders, this can wreak havoc. Financial havoc.

A FIFRA Section 2(ee) Recommendation has been issued for control of tadpole shrimp (TPS) using Dimilin 2L. The recommendation states to use Dimilin two to 10 days after the field is flooded; it also states that Dimilin does not appear to control adult TPS. Dimilin is an insect growth regulator.

So there we were, on Mother's Day, looking at the yet-to-bloom English lavender in our yard. And there it was, something golden staring back at us. It was showing a face that "only a mother could love"--or an entomologist or an insect enthusiast. Scathophaga stercoraria, the golden dung fly.

KARE outreach and education leader, Laura Van Der Staay, along with UCD Cooperative Extension Cropping Systems Specialist, Jeff Mitchell, had their hands full with over 300 enthusiastic Tulare County 4th graders as part of the 2017 half-day AgVentures extravaganza that was held at the International...

It was indeed a honey of a festival. When the inaugural California Honey Festival buzzed into Woodland on Saturday, May 6, organizers figured attendance might total around 3,000. No. It did not.

Like a ballerina on the dance floor of life, a newly eclosed Western tiger swallowtail, Papilio rutulus, flutters from its host plant, a sycamore tree, to a crape myrtle. The yellow-and-black butterfly spreads its wings, warming its flight muscles.

As part of our mission to test drone technology and provide mapping services to the ANR community, IGIS recently completed data collection for our largest drone mapping project to date - 3600 acres of the Mojave Desert.