In This Issue

Bohart Museum Society

Fall 2019 Newsletter No. 80

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Fall 2019

SPOTLIGHT ON A SPECIES

Native Bees: Going, Going, Gone? By Lynn Kimsey

Whenever we talk about bees and pollination, most folks focus on honey bees. Although honey bees are critically important pollinators in agroecosystems they are relatively unimportant in native habitats in the Americas. Social bees, like honey bees, stingless bees and bumblebees, are actually only a small component of over-all bee diversity. There are roughly 20,000 species of bees worldwide but only about 2% of these are social, living in colonies with a queen and workers. About 4,000 bee species are known from the U.S. and 40% of these occur in California!

Native bees are found on every continent except Antarctica. They are incredibly diverse, ranging in size

from less than 2 mm to nearly 4 cm in length (the giant leafcutter bee of Indonesia). They come in a wide diversity of colors, patterns and biologies. The biology and evolution of bees is closely linked to that of the flowering plants and the survival of many flowering plant species is closely linked to the survival of their pollinators.

There are seven families of bees including, Apidae, Megachilidae, Halictidae, Colletidae, Andrenidae, Colletidae, Melittidae and Stenotritidae. All of these families occur on multiple continents except for the Stenotritidae, which is a small family found only in Australia.

Apidae is the largest and most diverse group of bees, with nearly 6,000 species globally. It contains all of the fully social bees along with a large number of solitary bees that either nest in the ground, build nests out of mud or resin or nest in tunnels in wood. The remainder are the brightly colored orchid bees and large carpenter bees.

The megachilid or leaf-cutter bees are the second largest bee family with more than 4,000 species. Female megachilids are distinctive because unlike other bees they carry pollen in a special brush covering the underside of their abdomen. Many of them use their powerful mandibles to cut disks

Anthophora urbana visiting lavender. Photo courtesy of Kathy Keatley Garvey.

Continued on page 4.

CONTENTS

Directors Note 1

Spotlight on a Species 1

Museum News 2

New Exhibits 3

More Migrations 5

Museum Events 6

Ask the Bug Doctor 7

Bumble bee worker on Penstemon. Photo courtesy of Tom Roach.

Summer passed much too quickly this year, with so many interesting and fun things going on. Moth Night was great fun and all of our summer kids camps went really well. Now, all too soon it will be winter.

We have lots of activities planned for this coming year, with open houses devoted to spiders and pollinators among others. If all goes well we might have a giant tardigrade in front of the building.

As always, if there are any topics you’d like to see discussed get in touch.

-Lynn Kimsey

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Fall 2019

MUSEUM NEWS Visiting Scientists

We have two international scholars visiting the museum this fall, Syed Fahad Shah from the University of Agriculture, Peshwar, Pakistan, and Celso Oliveira Azevedo, from the Universidade Federal do Espirito Santo, Brazil.

Syed Shah is studying parasitoid wasps in the family Pteromalidae in the museum under the guidance of Steve Heydon. He will be here for 6 months,

Moth night crafts. Photo courtesy of Kathy Keatley Garvey.

Moth Night Open House

Saturday, August 3 we held our annual Moth Night open house. It was a huge success. More than 200 visitors attended the event and most stayed for the entire evening. We had crafts, hot chocolate and black lighting. Crafts focused on moths and butterflies. Kids made necklaces from moth cocoons.

The event was a success in large part to the special efforts of Emma Cluff and Tabatha Yang, and our volunteers and staff, Jeff Smith, Greg Kareofelas, Xiaofan Yang, Chloe Shott, Keely Davies and Steve Heydon.

Emma designed crafts, kid activities, and several new exhibits in time for the event. One, displaying the collection of silks and other materials contributed by Richard Peigler (below) and the other—luna moth wings below.

Emma Cluff and Keely Davies demonstrating their new creation in the hallway in front of the museum. Photo by Tabatha Yang.

Special Donation

and is returning to Pakistan at the end of October.

Celso Azevedo will be here for two weeks in September. He is a Bohart Museum Society sponsored visiting scientist. He will be studying our very large bethylid wasp collection. Dr. Azevedo is the world expert on this group.

New silk exhibit created by Emma Cluff. Photo by Lynn Kimsey.

In August, Sean Bradley and Jim Steed of Neighborly Pest Management, Inc. donated $500 to Jeff Smith to pay for glass for the specimen drawers he’s making for the Bohart Museum. Many thanks to Neighborly Pest for their generous donation.

Syed Shah, selfie. Celso Azevedo.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Fall 2019

Tardigrade Water bears and Summer Camps

This summer we had 34 pre-teens and teens from all over California, and even Wisconsin and New York, come to the Bohart Museum for three camps. We collaborate with the Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology and UC Davis Campus Recreation Youth Programs to run these museum-based, field ecology camps. Special thanks to Jeff Smith, Bohart Museum associate, for taking his time and talents to work with each camp in a unique way. From our evaluations this year:

“I loved this camp and the friendships here and information I learned here will last a lifetime, thanks Bohart for doing this.” Anonymous 2019 camper

The financial and organization support from UC Davis was great. Without it, attending the camp would not have been possible." - Anonymous 2019 parent of a camper.

“I pretty much always had a collection of live invertebrates, but I’ve never had the chance to really practice entomology with semi-formal methods. It was interesting to look at the field in the eyes of a researcher rather than the eyes of a hobbyist. I learned a lot about the methods of the field. Getting to bond with camp members who also shared such a strong passion for entomology was super fun & I wish I could spend more time with them.” –Brendan, 2019 BBC 2.0 camper

(Editor's note: The Bohart Museum Society provided three scholarships for camp programs this year totaling $822.50.)

Bio Boot Camps by Tabatha Yang

We are in the process of raising funds to commission a large tardigrade sculpture by local artist Solomon Bassoff of Faducci Sculpture.

The sculpture will be installed to honor the work of Steve Heydon’s predecessor, Bob Schuster and emeritus professor Albert A. Grigarick who assembled the collection through their research, and to call attention to our huge collection of these odd creatures.

It is ironic that these tiny organisms are known by anyone outside of specialists. However, tardigrades are really popular with kids in part because of their representation in the movies Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, Star Trek and Family Guy. They are also known because of their remarkable ability to survive normally unsurvivable environmental conditions. Tardigrades may even have colonized the Moon. The SpaceIL spacecraft recently crashed on the moon carrying a payload of thousands of tardigrades.

The sculpture in concrete will and will be roughly 4ft x8 ft. If you are interested in helping out get in touch with us directly, or we have started a GoFundMe page and you can contribute there.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/waterbear-sculpture

Mock-up of tardigrade sculpture in front of the museum building.

Tardigrade Sculpture

Jeff Smith teaching campers how to spread butterfly wings in the Wildlife, Fish & Conservation Biology classroom at UC Davis.

Puns We are hiding puns in the museum for kids to find. Here’s an example of one:

What is on the ground and also 100 feet in the air?

Answer: A centipede on its back.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Fall 2019

from leaves to make their nests in preexisting tunnels. Some species of these leaf-cutter bees are used commercially to pollinate a number of crops including alfalfa. Others, such as the blue orchard bee, are being used in place of honey bees to pollinate some tree crops. An exotic megachilid, the wool carder bee, is now also found in California.

Sweat bees (Halictidae) are all ground nesters. They exhibit a diversity of sociality, ranging from solitary to semisocial with one dominant female. Nomia melanderi, the alkali bee, is the only solitary ground-nesting bee species used in crop pollination.

Andrenids are also ground nesting solitary bees. This is a large family of several thousand species, but the majority of species belong in only two genera, Andrena, which are medium-sized dark colored bees, and Perdita, which are small to tiny usually black and yellow bees.

Colletid bees are unusual because they use a biological equivalent of plastic to waterproof their nests. These bees fly early in the spring or before sunrise in desert regions. The colletid genus Hylaeus is unusual because they are nearly hairless and carry pollen in their stomachs. They are one of the few groups of bees that nest above the ground usually in hollow stems.

Melittidae is a small family of ground nesting bees found in the Northern Hemisphere and Africa. They closely resemble andrenids.

Female solitary bees generally build their individual nests, which contain multiple larval cells. They provision each cell with a ball of pollen and nectar. This ball of pollen and nectar is often referred to as "bee bread". It is closer to bread than you'd think. As female bees mix the two together, they also incorporate yeasts and bacteria into the mix; microbes that are found on their bodies and in the flowers they visit. The activity (fermentation) by yeasts and bacteria in the pollen masses creates micro-nutrients, vitamins and co-factors that

Continued from page 1.

baby bees need to develop and thrive. The resulting mixture is much higher in nutritional quality than simply pollen and nectar. After provisioning a cell the female generally lays an egg on it, closes the cell, and moves on to the next one.

So what is happening today? Today there are multiple articles about the "insect apocalypse", with the diversity of insects in some regions dropping by as much as 80%. Honey bees have also been experiencing die-offs, often called colony collapse disorder (CCD). There seem to be a number of factors involved, but it seems unlikely that there is one overriding cause, except us.

One surprisingly important factor in the health of bees is the role that the microbial fauna plays in bee nests and hives. Anything that impacts microbes will impact bee health. Fungicides used in agriculture do not harm adult honeybees, but if a honeybee worker carries them into the nest these compounds can potentially eliminate yeasts in the pollen masses she makes, thus affecting the nutrition of the baby bees. This can have a direct impact on a young honey- bee's development and make them more susceptible to diseases. These same chemicals undoubtedly also affect solitary bees.

Humans have many ways of transforming environments and many of these directly

affect insect populations. Think about the effect of removing native vegetation and replacing it with exotic plant species: trees, shrubs, lawns, etc. Social bees are generalists but most solitary bees are pretty host plant specific. So, by removing host plants we've eliminated a lot of or all of the food for many native bees.

Then consider where the majority of bees nest. Roughly 70% of bee species build their nests in the ground, others nest in tunnels in dead wood. Humans obsessively remove dead wood. Thus removing nest sites for bees that nest in wood. Perhaps more destructive is the recent landscaping technique of covering exposed soil, particularly in sunny areas, with rock, mulch or chipped wood. Ground nesting bees are unable to build their nests in situations where the soil has been covered this way. It prevents them from reaching the soil to build tunnels. The other problem with covering the ground with chipped wood has nothing to do with ground nesting bees and wasps. By covering the soil with one or two inches of chipped wood you have now created a great termite buffet. You really don't want to put this material near your house.

There is no question that human activities impact native and exotic bees, like honey bees. Affecting these insects directly impacts native plant species even in relatively undisturbed sites because such sites are becoming more and more isolated. The question then is what can be done if anything to reverse, stop, or limit the effects of human activities on bees. NO WOOD CHIPS!!!

Alkali bee larva on bee bread. Photo courtesy of

Jim Cane, USDA.

Digger bee building a nest in sand. Photo by Lynn Kimsey.

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Fall 2019

MORE MIGRATIONS desert region. This species has periodic outbreaks like typical locusts, and this year was no exception. Like the stinkbug, this grasshopper is also indiscriminate in what plants it feeds on and large numbers can decimate crops, such as alfalfa, during outbreaks.

The California tortoiseshell butterfly (Nymphalis californica) was also flying in spectacular numbers late this past summer between Mt. Lassen and Yosemite, a distance of at least 230 miles. These reddish orange and black butterflies are a bit smaller than monarchs, and there seems to be some public confusion about the two. One of our recent visitors called these smaller butterflies “baby monarchs”.

The tortoiseshell butterfly, or “Tortie” as Art Shapiro calls it, overwinters in the adult stage. Their caterpillars are spiny, with black and yellow markings. They feed on a variety of Ceanothus species. Adults can be particularly abundant during the summer in high altitude regions of the Sierra, Trinity Alps, and southern Cascades. The numbers flying this year are apparently in part to due to the large numbers of surviving overwintering adults and equally large numbers of happy Ceanothus plants, due to higher than usual rainfall/snow and ironically, fires. For more information on these “baby monarchs” and other butterflies, take a look at Art Shapiro’s Butterfly Site:

The western U.S. experienced an oddly wet winter and spring this year with usually large amounts of snow and high rainfall in May. This late rainfall seems to have led to huge population outbreaks of insect species we don’t often see in large numbers.

The New Year started off in March with an impressive migration of painted lady butterflies flying north from the southern deserts. We observed hundreds of adults, caterpillars and pupae in the Imperial Dunes east of El Centro in southern California. The north-ward migrating adults passed through Davis for more than a month flying.

In the Great Basin Region of southern Utah, Nevada and eastern California two very different insect species were occurring in huge numbers, green stinkbugs (Chinavia halaris) and pallid-winged grasshoppers (Trimerotropis pallidipennis). In both cases Las Vegas took the brunt of the outbreaks, with streets and buildings covered with these insects.

Large numbers of green stinkbugs were observed in towns, like Las Vegas, attracted to lights and resting on surfaces. These stink bugs feed on a wide variety of plants and in large numbers can damage fruit trees and even marijuana plants.

The pallid-winged grasshopper is a common inhabitant of the southwestern

Green stinkbugs in southern Utah. Photo courtesy of T.W. Petersen, St. George News. Insert, green stinkbug, photo by Vik Nanda, Wikimedia Commons.

California tortoiseshell butterfly. Photo by Walter Siegmund, Wikipedia.

Pallid-winged grasshopper. Photo by Sanjay Acharya, Wikipedia.

Radar image of migrating grasshoppers in southern Nevada from the U. S. National Weather Service.

http://butterfly.ucdavis.edu/butterfly/Nymphalis/californica

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Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Fall 2019

OPEN HOUSES FOR THE 2019-2020 YEAR

This year our open houses will be held on the third Saturday of each month from 1-4pm, with the exception of December. Picnic Day and Biodiversity Museum Day will have different hours.

September 21:

Gobble, Gobble, Munch, Munch, CRUNCH: Entomophagy

October 19:

Parasitoid Palooza!

October 26:

Bohart Society Halloween party

November 16:

Arthropod Husbandry: Raising Insects for Research & Fun

January 18:

Time flies when you are studying insects: Cutting edge student research

February 15:

BIODIVERSITY MUSEUM DAY

March 21:

Busy Bees and Their Microbial Friends

April 18:

PICNIC DAY

May 16:

Farmers’ Foes and Friends

June TBD:

Eight Legged Wonders, with the American Arachnological Society

MUSEUM EVENTS

Halloween

Members

Open

House

Please join us for the annual Bohart Mu-seum Society members Halloween Open House party:

Saturday, October 26

from 5-8 pm

In the Bohart Museum*

*Costumes optional.

Lepidopterist’s Society Meeting

The Lepidopterist’s Society held their annual meeting in Davis this year, from July 9-12. We held a reception for the group in the Museum, the night of the 9th and got to show off the collection to attendees.

Daniel Rubinoff, Fran Keller, Michael Collins, Brian Scholtens and SangMi Lee. Photo courtesy of Kathy Keatley Garvey.

Karl Gardner (left) and Bill Shepherd (right) looking at photos. Photo courtesy of Kathy Keatley Garvey.

More Bug Puns…

People who don’t know the difference between

etymology and entomology bug me in ways I can’t

put into words.

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ASK THE BUG DOCTOR If you have an insect question, need advice, want an identification of something you’ve found, or would like to see an article in the newsletter on a particular topic let us know. Email us at bmuseum@ucdavis.edu.

Alder Pests

A number of insect species seem to be in outbreak mode this summer. Here’s yet another, though this one is more attractive than most. Larvae of the alder leaf beetle, Agelastica alni, are defoliating entire alder trees in the vicinity of Lake Tahoe.

Odd Yellow Jacket Nest

Cheryl Smith recently discovered that yellow jackets had converted her bird-house into an aerial nest. Thanks to Jim Tassano (Foothill Sierra Pest Control) we have the nest for a new exhibit planned on yellow jackets in the museum.

Bohart Museum Society Newsletter Fall 2019

More Yellow Jackets

One of the unanticipated consequences of a warming climate is the potential for yellow jacket nests to become perennial. Today, in California we think of these nests as annual, i.e. the colony has to be started anew every spring by an overwintering young queen. However, enormous car-filling nests are often reported in southeastern states such as Alabama. As the climate gets warmer, more insects will remain active longer and there will be resources to keep yellow jacket nests going year round. We’ve already seen a few instances of this in coastal California. These perennial nests can become huge, with more than 50,000 workers.

Face Moth

Steve Hamblin sent us this photo of a distinctively marked moth that he found in New Mexico. According to Jeff Smith it is a cossid carpenter worm moth in the species Inguromorpha itzalana. [Phew, try saying that name fast.] This species is recorded from Texas to Arizona down into Central America. The caterpillar food plant is apparently unknown.

Leaping Larvae!

The secret of how the tiny larvae of gall wasps make galls jump is now revealed. Researchers at Duke University worked out the mechanism using an incredibly high speed video camera (20,000 frames/second!) and scanning electron microscope. They found that the larva bends itself into a loop using two patches of microscopic hair (the larvae is only a couple of millimeters long) which latch together its head and rear ends. It then increases its internal pressure until the connection frees, flinging them into the air. This behavior makes it possible for the larva to break the gall loose from the leaf it formed on and fall to the ground where it bounces around until the gall containing the larva falls into a crack or crevice in the ground where the larva pupates.

More Migrators

Scientists at the University of Exeter in England recently discovered that the marmalade hoverfly, Episyrphus balteatus, had a distinctive radar signature in the lab. So of course they then used this distinctive signature to look for the presence of the fly using a radar network that can detect insects flying above 450 feet. They discovered an estimated 4 billion of these flies migrating into and out of southern England annually!

Yellow jacket nest/birdhouse held by Ryles Duane Harvey Lewis Richards. Photo courtesy of Heather Nordstrom.

Cossid satanic devil face moth. Photo by Steve Hamblin.

Alder leaf beetles. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Poore.

Marmalade hoverfly. Photo by Charles J. Sharp, Wikipedia.

Jumping galls. Photo courtesy of Kirsten Prior, Binghamton University.

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Bohart Museum Society c/o Department of Entomology & Nematology University of California One Shields Ave. Davis, CA 95616

Halloween Members Open House

Oct. 26, 2019 5 to 8 PM