Earlier this month, I attended the 2011 Plant and Soil Conference which was held in Fresno this year. This annual meeting put on by the California Chapter of the American Society of Agronomy (http://calasa.ucdavis.
It's not just honey bees that forage among the cape mallows in the Hagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at the University of California, Davis. The brilliant magenta flowers also draw assorted other insects. Such as flies...hover flies.
National No-till Farmer magazine has published an article by a member of the UC Conservation Tillage and Cropping Systems Workgroup, Michael Crowell. The Crowell family has been in the dairy business in Turlock for more than 100 years.
No thanks to the recent storms, almond orchards are encountering Nature's Extreme Makeover--from fluffy popcorn blossoms to tattered petals reminiscent of bottom-of-the-bag kernels. Still, there's something spectacular about driving down a rural road in Dixon, Calif.
So you want to attract native pollinators to your garden. The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, based in Portland, Ore., has just published a 380-page book, Attracting Native Pollinators, that encourages you to do just that.
You never know who's coming to dinner...er...reception. When the UC Davis Department of Entomology hosted an open house today for prospective graduate students, the Bohart Museum of Entomology brought along some thorny walking sticks.
