Ongoing research

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It hasn't been a good year for honey bees, no thanks to colony collapse disorder, but it has been a good year for the release of educational information. The latest edition of The Bee Health Update, a bimonthly newsletter which updates current activities around the Bee Health, eXtension.

The yellow-faced bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii) may be one of the most underappreciated pollinators. You see it buzzing around lavender, lupine, California poppies, mustard and other plants.

First it was the California poppies. Then the lupine. And now it's coreopsis, aka tickseed. It's seasonal blooming at the Campus Buzzway, a quarter-acre wildflower garden planted last fall at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road at UC Davis.

It was an aphid-kind of day. When a ladybug landed on a gaura in our bee friendly garden, it was business as usual. The business: eating aphids. The rose aphids sucking the plant juices from the tender shoot didn't last long. This is why ladybugs are known as "beneficial insects.

The eyes have it. Look at the compound eyes of an insect. Some are colorful, some are drab. But they are all organs that detect light.

If you like to take photos of insects that are as small as a grain of rice, then you'll love--absolutely love--stalking a sweat bee. Sweat bees, members of the worldwide family Halictinae and order Hymenoptera, are so-named because they are attracted to human perspiration or "sweat.

Temperature and plant growth, midseason nitrogen fertilizer, managing weed populations to protect against herbicide resistance.

One of the many enduring features of the Hagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at the University of California, Davis, is the inclusion of fruit trees, garden vegetables and herbs, and plants bearing such delicacies as strawberries, raspberries, Oregon grape and elderberry.

Nature's creatures are nature's features at the Solano County Fair, Vallejo, being held Wednesday, June 23 through Sunday, June 27. Creative exhibitors, in a "this-bug's-for-you" mood, transformed butterflies, ladybugs and bumble bees into arts and crafts projects being displayed in McCormack Hall.