Test PB Collection: FTE

If you like bugs and live in Northern California, you're in luck. The newly formed California Bug Club has scheduled its first meeting for 6 p.m., Satuday, Jan. 12 in the Elk Grove Library's meeting room, 8900 Elk Grove Blvd.

Marestail (Conyza canadensis; aka horseweed) and hairy fleabane (C. bonariensis; aka flax leaf fleabane) are serious weed problems in vineyards in Monterey County.

Deep in the forest, in a tree so old its bark is blackened and its roots are larger around than a man, a beetle flaps its wings.

Hanford dairy farmer Dino Giacomazzi, a founding member of UC Conservation Agriculture Systems Innovation (CASI), received the prestigious 2012 Leopold Conservation Award for California in acknowledgement of his exemplary land stewardship and management.

Winter is a good time to catch up on scientific reading.

Just call it going for the roses. Or a hot spot. In between the showers and the sunshine, the bees at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road, University of California, Davis, emerge from their hives to forage.

Novaluron (Rimon 0.83 EC, Chemtura USA Corp, Middlebury, CT) is a popular insecticide used by the strawberry growers for managing nymphal stages of the lygus bug.

It's the Big 4-0 for the Almond Board of California's annual almond industry conference this week. Some 1000 convention-goers are gathering in the Sacramento Convention Center. The 40th annual conference opened Tuesday, Dec. 11 and runs through Thursday, Dec. 13.

When chemical ecologist Walter Leal, professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, was elected to the prestigious Brazilian Academy of Sciences, his lab members donned matching t-shirts--t-shirts with a touch of humor and a dose of humility. On the front: "I did the work.

Over the past few years, herbicides with the active ingredient glufosinate (Rely, Rely 200, Rely 280) have become very important in California tree nut orchards and grape vineyards.