Her Cup Runneth Over
Her cup runneth over.
Only a select group of people win the Franklin's Bumble Bee coffee cup, and UC Davis alumna Lesley Hamamoto of Sacramento recently received hers for being named the winner of the 2026 Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble-Bee-of-the-Year Contest, sponsored by the Bohart Museum of Entomology.
Hamamoto, a biologist/botanist with the Department of Water Resources, State of California since 2008, a bumble bee enthusiast and a former seven-year UC Davis employee, photographed a black-tailed bumble bee, Bombus melanopygus, nectaring on manzanita at 9:59 am., Friday, Jan. 2 in the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden.
For the annual contest, the first person to photograph the first bumble bee of the year in Yolo or Solano County wins a cup, decorated with the critically endangered Franklin's bumble bee, Bombus franklini, the bee that the late UC Davis Distinguished Emeritus Professor Robbin Thorp monitored for decades on the northern California-southern Oregon border. He last saw it in 2006 and it is now feared extinct.
Hamamoto serves as president of the Sacramento Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS) and as a volunteer with the California Bumble Bee Atlas,
She received the cup during a recent visit to the Bohart Museum. UC Davis Distinguished Professor Emerita Lynn Kimsey, Bohart Museum director for 34 years until her retirement last February, and Tabatha Yang, the Bohart Museum's education and outreach coordinator, presented her with the cup. She also viewed the Bohart Museum's specimens of Franklin bumble bee.
Her co-worker Michael Kwong, a senior environmental scientist with the State of California, teamed with fellow Monarch Watch participant Kaylen Teves of Vallejo, to win the 2025 contest. They photographed a yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, on Jan. 11 on an oak leaf at the Glen Cove Marina, Vallejo.
Coming in second place in the 2026 contest was Julia Luckenbill of Davis, who photographed a B. vosnesenskii, at 4:30 p.m., Jan. 3 at West Davis Pond in Davis.
The bumble bee contest, launched in 2021, memorializes Professor Thorp (1933-2019), a tireless advocate of pollinator species protection and conservation and co-author of Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide (Princeton University) and California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists (Heyday). Although he retired from the faculty in 1994 after 30 years of service, he continued his bee research until a week before he died, at age 85. Every January, he looked forward to seeing the first bumble bee of the year.
Hamamoto has participated since 2022 as a volunteer with the California Bumble Bee Atlas, a statewide community science project aimed at tracking and conserving California's native bumble bees. She has organized an annual "bumblepalooza" weekend for the last two years “for some of my friends that I met in the field course and we meet up and do a bunch of Atlas surveys.
Hamamoto received her bachelor's degree in biological sciences, with a plant biology emphasis, from UC Davis in 2001, and went on to receive her master's degree from Sacramento State University. She worked at UC Davis in Plant Biology for seven years before accepting her position with the State of California.
The Bohart Bumble Bee Committee includes three members who worked with Thorp: UC Davis Distinguished Professor Emerita Lynn Kimsey, who directed the Bohart Museum for 34 years; Tabatha Yang, education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum; and Kathy Keatley Garvey, communications specialist, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
Beginnings of the Contest
Every January, Thorp encouraged his "posse"--bumble bee enthusiasts and insect photographers Allan Jones, Kathy Keatley Garvey, Gary Zamzow and Kim Chacon--to find and photograph the first bumble bee of the year in Yolo and Solano counties. Chacon, the 2019 winner, was the last to win the informal bee contest. Location: The UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. At the time, she was a UC Davis doctoral student researching "habitat connectivity issues for bees at a landscape scale." She is a 2018 alumna of The Bee Course, a nine-day intensive workshop affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and held annually at the Southwestern Research Station, Portal, Ariz. Thorp, one of the instructors, taught the course from 2002 to 2018.
In addition to the 2025 winners, the recipients of the Franklin Bumble Bee Cup are:
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.
The Bohart Museum, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, 455 Crocker Lane, UC Davis, houses a global collection of eight million specimens. Director of the Bohart is Professor Jason Bond, the Evert and Marion Schlinger Endowed Chair of Systematics, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and executive associate dean, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.
Cover image: Franklin's bumble bee specimens at Bohart Museum of Entomology. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)