Ongoing research

Have you hugged your favorite pollinator today? It's National Pollinator Week, and you're allowed to do that this week. Actually, any time you feel the inclination. Honey bees, bumble bees, wool carder bees, leafcutter bees, sweat bees--they're all out there, ready for a hug.

Who celebrated the most? Homo sapiens or Apis mellifera? It was difficult to tell.

Tabatha Yang saw it first. She's the education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis. What she saw--in a grassy field at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, west of the central campus--was a golden ladybug, aka lady beetle.

Since the early 1980s, the California Department of Boating and Waterways (BWW) has been increasingly successful in managing two invasive aquatic weeds in the Sacrament-San Joaquin Delta: water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) and Brazilian waterweed (Egeria densa).

Someone asked me a question this morning about management option for hairy fleabane and it reminded me of a nice publication that Anil, Kurt, and Steve put together a couple years ago. See ANR Publication 8314 here: http://ucanr.org/freepubs/docs/8314.

I spoke last week at the Central San Joaquin Valley Summer Almond Meeting (in Merced, CA) as part of a program that encompassed the almond industry, insect pests, disease managemment and weed control among other topics.

A streak of gray, but don't wash it away. The gray hairstreak is a butterfly. We spotted this delicate-looking butterfly (Strymon melinus) on a red pincushion flower (Scabiosa) this week in Winters, Yolo County. Gray on red. Fauna on flora. A Strymon on a Scabiosa.

It's been dubbed "The Manhattan Project of Entomology." And it may have "the potential to revolutionize the way we think about insects," says Richard Levine, communications program manager of the Entomological Society of America (ESA). Call it "The Manhattan Project of Entomology.

Here's the beginning of the 2011 rice season in three graphs*: Degree day (DD) accumulation over the developmental threshold of 55 oF (starting May 1st) during early May in 2011 was similar to 2008 and 2009.

The feather-legged fly looks as if it were formed by a committee. It's about the size of a house fly, but there the similarity ends. Black head and thorax, hind legs fringed with a "comb" of short black hairs, and an abdomen that's the color of honey--bright orange honey.