Bug Squad

Entomologist Jeff Smith of Rocklin, an associate at the Bohart Museum of Entomology who has saved the museum some $160,000 over a 27-year period through his volunteer service, received a well deserved "Friend of the College Award of Distinction from the UC Davis College of Agricultural and Environme...

Will all the pollinators please stand up! Or do a fly-by like the Blue Angels or a crawl-by like babies competing in a diaper derby. Bees--there are more than 4000 of them in North America--are the main pollinators, but don't overlook butterflies, beetles, birds, bats and moths. And flies.

The circle of life... Monarch caterpillars feast on milkweed, their host plant. Oleander aphids feast on the juices of milkweed plants. Lady beetles, better known as ladybugs (but they're beetles, not bugs) feast on the aphids. The milkweed is the only plant that the monarch caterpillars eat.

Dragonflies are fierce predators but they are predator-shy. "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck," as the saying goes.

The work of the late chemical ecologist/UC Davis professor Sean Duffey (1943-1997) lives on.