Test PB Collection: FTE

March was busy month for the IGIS team. We started out with only one member of our group (Sean Hogan) being a FAA certified drone pilot, and ended the month with the rest of the team - Maggi, Shane, Robert, and Andy - having also obtained their FAA Remote Pilot License with sUAS Rating.

The US Manager of BCI, the Better Cotton Initiative, Scott Exo, and BCI's San Joaquin Valley Coordinator, Carlos Silva, visited the longstanding NRI Project field in Five Points, CA on March 28, 2017 as part of a tour hosted by CASI's Jeff Mitchell.

This is the abstract of a presentation that was made at the recent Huanglongbing Conference held in Orlando, FL. This and other paper abstracts will soon be available at: http://irchlb.org/files/33373ab0-7df3-4117-9.

If you like writing with light (photography), then you'll probably love capturing images of honey bees spinning like helicopters. In the late afternoon, when the light softens, head over to your favorite Spanish lavender patch.

Spring is in the air and volunteering is blooming!...

Let's wing it, they said. And they did. But this event wasn't "winged"; it was well planned and rooted in educational information. Wings? A reference to the flutter of the ever decreasing butterfly wings.

A quick note to share a link to our (semi) regularly updated "Herbicide Registration on California Tree and Vine Crops". Click here for a link to the PDF version on the Weed Research and Information Center page (this is probably your best bet for the most up-to-date version).

A position announcement I shared in October (http://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=22336) was re-released last week. The new search ends on April 18, 2017. Job announcement for the Associate Director / Field Research Coordinator for the Western Region IR-4 Program.

A recent auction in South Africa was selling 'Maluma' variety of avocado for $92 a tree. That is more than the average price of avocado nursery trees in that country and a lot more than what is paid in California or Florida.

There's gold on them thar roses. No, not the kind of gold found during the California Gold Rush (18481855) that brought some 300,000 folks to the Golden State. These are gold eggs from the multicolored Asian beetle, Harmonia axyridis, that we found on our Sparkle-and-Shine roses last week.