Bohart Museum Contest: Let's Bumble!
Don't tumble, fumble or crumble when you see a "bumble."
Hold your camera steady.
Starting Jan. 1, if you photograph or video a bumble bee in the two-county area of Solano and Yolo, and if you're judged the winner, you will win the sixth annual Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble Bee-of-the-Year Contest, sponsored by the Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis.
All you need do is email the image (it must be discernible), with the time, date and place, to the Bohart Museum of Entomology at bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.
The prize: bragging rights, and a coffee cup designed with the endangered Franklin's bumble bee, the bee that Thorp monitored on the California-Oregon border for decades.
The contest, launched in 2021, memorializes Professor Thorp (1933-2019), a global authority on bees and a UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor of entomology, who died June 7, 2019 at age 85. A 30-year member of the UC Davis faculty, he retired in 1994 but continued working until several weeks before his death. Every year he looked forward to seeing the first bumble bee in the area.
The black-tailed bumble bee, Bombus melanopygus, is usually the first bumble bee to emerge in this area, Thorp used to say. It forages on manzanitas, wild lilacs, wild buckwheats, lupines, penstemons, clovers, and sages, among others.
Monarch Watch volunteers Michael Kwong of Sacramento and Kaylen Teves of Vallejo, won the 2025 Robbin Thorp Bumble Bee Memorial Contest with their image of a yellow-faced bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii) taken Jan. 11 on an oak leaf at the Glen Cove Marina, Vallejo. At the time, Kwong, a senior environmental scientist with the State of California, and Teves a computer science student at San Francisco State University, were looking for monarchs.
Previous record-holders:
2024: Nancy Hansen of Fairfield, who photographed a black-tailed bumble bee, B. melanopygus, in her yard at 10:57 a.m., Monday, Jan. 1.
2023: Ria deGrassi of Davis, who photographed a B. melanopygus at 12:32, Jan. 8 on a ceanothus in her yard.
2022: Tie between Maureen Page, then a doctoral candidate in the lab of pollination ecologist Neal Williams, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; and Ellen Zagory of Davis, retired director of public horticulture for the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. Each photographed a bumble bee on manzanita in the Arboretum at 2:30 p.m., Jan. 1. Page photographed a B. melanopygus, while Zagory captured an image of the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii.
2021: UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Charlie Casey Nicholson, then of the Williams lab and the Elina Lastro Niño lab, photographed a B. melanopygus at 3:10 p.m., Jan. 14 in a manzanita patch in the Arboretum.
Cover Image: Bombus melanopygus nectaring on a pansy in a Vacaville garden. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)