Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen of the Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, writes an interesting bimonthly newsletter. He's been writing from the UC Apiaries since he joined the department's faculty in 1976. Never missed an edition. Not one.
Last weekend we spotted a San Francisco-bound car sporting a bumper sticker that read simply: "I brake for bugs." Indeed. Bugs rule. Bugs are cool. Bugs are definitely worth stopping for (especially if it's the Bohart Museum of Entomology at UC Davis which houses seven million specimens).
We can learn a lot from insects, especially when a predator ambushes its prey. An ambush, as defined by Wikipedia "is a long-established military tactic in which the aggressors (the ambushing force) use concealment to attack a passing enemy.
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. --Nathaniel Hawthorne Maybe not "alight upon you," but stay long enough for you to admire it.
It hasn't been a good year for honey bees, no thanks to colony collapse disorder, but it has been a good year for the release of educational information. The latest edition of The Bee Health Update, a bimonthly newsletter which updates current activities around the Bee Health, eXtension.
The yellow-faced bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii) may be one of the most underappreciated pollinators. You see it buzzing around lavender, lupine, California poppies, mustard and other plants.
First it was the California poppies. Then the lupine. And now it's coreopsis, aka tickseed. It's seasonal blooming at the Campus Buzzway, a quarter-acre wildflower garden planted last fall at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road at UC Davis.
It was an aphid-kind of day. When a ladybug landed on a gaura in our bee friendly garden, it was business as usual. The business: eating aphids. The rose aphids sucking the plant juices from the tender shoot didn't last long. This is why ladybugs are known as "beneficial insects.
