After an extended cool and wet spring, we are finally getting summer-like weather in most of the Central Valley. If your garden and home landscape are like mine, now is the time of the year where the winter weeds are winding down and the summer weeds are coming in to take their places.
Forceps, please! Have you ever stopped to admire a blossom and seen forceps protruding? Earwig! We were walking near Mrak Hall, UC Davis, on a hot summery afternoon and spotted a tell-tale sign: abdominal forceps, aka pinchers or pincers. Earwig! We unfolded the blossom and an earwig crawled out.
Honey bee foragers collect nectar, pollen, water and propolis. Propolis? What's propolis? It's that sticky plant resin or "goo" that the bees use to seal small spaces in the hive. It's also known as "bee glue.
Have you hugged your favorite pollinator today? It's National Pollinator Week, and you're allowed to do that this week. Actually, any time you feel the inclination. Honey bees, bumble bees, wool carder bees, leafcutter bees, sweat bees--they're all out there, ready for a hug.
Tabatha Yang saw it first. She's the education and outreach coordinator for the Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis. What she saw--in a grassy field at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, west of the central campus--was a golden ladybug, aka lady beetle.
Since the early 1980s, the California Department of Boating and Waterways (BWW) has been increasingly successful in managing two invasive aquatic weeds in the Sacrament-San Joaquin Delta: water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) and Brazilian waterweed (Egeria densa).
Someone asked me a question this morning about management option for hairy fleabane and it reminded me of a nice publication that Anil, Kurt, and Steve put together a couple years ago. See ANR Publication 8314 here: http://ucanr.org/freepubs/docs/8314.
I spoke last week at the Central San Joaquin Valley Summer Almond Meeting (in Merced, CA) as part of a program that encompassed the almond industry, insect pests, disease managemment and weed control among other topics.
