Test PB Collection: FTE

Good news. Its official.

It's a sad photo. The antenna of a honey bee pokes out of an abandoned hive. Victim of colony collapse disorder (CCD)? Perhaps. Everytime I look at the bent antenna, I think of a plea for help. Help me! Help me! Please help me! This bee should have been nectaring flowers or gathering pollen.

Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, said it best. "Headgear." The "headgear" was actually a Giant New Guinea Walking Stick crawling up the face of Eric San Gregorio, an undergraduate student majoring in entomology at UC Davis.

Hover flies do know how to hover. Like a helicopter with spinning blades, the hover fly lingers seemingly motionless in mid-air over a flower before zeroing down to feed on the nectar. Sometimes theyre called flower flies. Sometimes syprhids.

There they sat, a row of jack o'lanterns ready for a light. Undergraduate students at the University of California, Davis, created them for the "Happy Halloween" open house, held Oct. 23 at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, 1124 Academic Surge, UC Davis.

If you're interested in insects--the good, the bad and the ugly--don't miss the Northern California Entomology Society meeting on Thursday, Nov. 6 in Contra Costa County. You don't have to be a member.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. That inductive reasoning (known as "the duck test") doesn't hold true for yellow bugs with black spots. A yellow ladybug (ladybird beetle) and a cucumber beetle look a little alike--at first glance.

The red-pigmented white pitcher plant we purchased at the UC Davis Arboretum Plant Faire looks like a flamboyant coral reef. Like a hat askew, its ruffled lid hangs over the trumpet-shaped pitcher. The pitcher is actually a long, hollow tubular leaf. But looks are deceiving.

Pull up a lawn chair and watch the honey bees. They're buzzing around the Russian sage, gathering nectar. So focused are they that they don't seeem to mind the photographer sharing their space. So dedicated. So committed. So industrious. Wait, a honey bee is wearing a new hat.

Cmon, you know you want one. Who wouldnt want a horror skull stress ball to relieve the tension of today's world? Here's what you do. Take one stress ball. Place it in the palm of your hand and squeeze. From the eyeball socket pops out a membrane of assorted bugs.