Test PB Collection: FTE

Controlling invasive aquatic plants such as waterhyacinth, South American spongeplant, and waterprimrose in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is no easy task.

This is a story about how eight monarch butterflies escaped the freezing temperatures of Vacaville, Calif., and hitchhiked to sunny Santa Cruz, thanks to Good Samaritans (Good Monarcharians?) Rita LeRoy and Walter Rockholt of Vallejo.

It's almost that time againtime for the annual Beer for a Butterfly contest or Suds for a Bug. If you're out and about on Jan. 1, start looking for that cabbage white butterfly.

If you want to learn about native bees, the place to "bee" on Saturday, Jan. 7 is the Rush Ranch Nature Center, 3521 Grizzly Island Road, Suisun.

Back in March of 1977, ABC launched a TV comedy-drama series titled "Eight Is Enough." It was about a Sacramento, Calif., family with eight children. The journalist/father, Tom Bradford, wrote a column for the fictitious Sacramento Register. "Eight Is Enough!" the father declared. He was wrong.

Dec. 22 marked the winter solstice, the first day of winter. But don't tell that to the western yellowjacket, Vespula pensylvanica. It's supposed to be hibernating, not flying. But there it is flying around--and sipping nectar--from flowering Algerian ivy climbing a fence in Vacaville, Calif.

This is the first post in our new blogging platform created as part of the ongoing improvements and developments from the UC Agronomy Research and Information Center (AgRIC).

Our unseasonably warm temperatures in November yielded 12 unexpected surprises: 12 monarch caterpillars munching away on the tropical milkweed in our pollinator garden in Vacaville, Calif.

It's a bugworthy kind of Christmas.

When you enter the Bohart Museum of Entomology, located in Room 1124 of the Academic Surge Building, on Crocker Lane, University of California, Davis, be sure to look up. Way up! Way up? Where? Up there, on your left! See them? Above the shelved books. What are they? Insects? Right, they're insects.