Test PB Collection: FTE

Diners know that a napkin serves a good purpose: touch the lips with it or protect the lap. Well, honey bees occasionally use a napkin, too. A recent sun break--blue skies, 70-degree temperatures, no rain--resulted in honey bees foraging for water on a rain-soaked napkin on the patio.

His topic is enticing: "The Irritable Insect." We've all found a few species of insects irritable; some more than others. (Apiculturists know how grumpy bees are when they open a hive on a cold, rainy day.

**EVENT DATE CHANGE** Event: Weed Science School 2011 Date: Sept. 6-8, 2011 (not Sept. 19-21, 2011) Location: UC Davis More information will be posted on the UC Weed Research & Information Center website (http://wric.ucdavis.edu.

2011 Spring Sac Valley Valley Walnut News from Janine Hasey, UC Farm Advisor, Sutter & Yuba Counties. Contains meeting announcements and very useful information on walnuts.

When honey bees make the transition from egg to larva to pupa to adult, it's magical. Today we watched bees chew through their cell cappings, flex their antennae, crawl out, and immediately look around for work to do.

Last week I visited one of my favorite experimental sites: the SMUD wind farm in the Montezuma Hills, at the south edge of Solano County. The site overlooks the Sacramento River where its a half-mile wide.

If you head over to the California State Capitol tomorrow (Tuesday, March 23) don't be too surprised if there's a John Deere tractor on the west steps. March 23 is Ag Day when the state's urban and rural folks come out in force to celebrate the state's $34.8 billion ag industry.

If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have not more than four years to live." That comment, widely attributed to physicist Albert Einstein, is all over the web.

You may have heard about the "Bug Boot Camp" that ant specialist Phil Ward, professor of entomology at the UC Davis Department of Entomology, conducts for graduate and undergraduate students every other summer.

Deep in the bowels of Briggs Hall on the UC Davis campus, entomology graduate student Kelly Hamby works on a pest that is giving growers fits: spotted wing drosophila (Drosophila suzukii).