Bug Squad

...Birds do it, bees do it Even educated fleas do it Let's do it, let's fall in love --Cole Porter When Cole Porter wrote Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love in 1928, he wasn't thinking about butterflies. He was thinking of birds, bees and...well, educated fleas.

With all the increasing--and alarming--global concern about declining pollinators, it's great to see some good news: pollination ecologist Neal Williams of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology is one of the Highly Cited Researchers in the 2018 list just released by Clarivate Analytic...

"Drones are male bees that contribute only in the perm production for the queen." So wrote an undergraduate student in one of Lynn Kimsey's entomology classes at the University of California, Davis. The student meant "sperm." But it came out "perm.

Have you ever seen a wasp oviposit or lay its eggs inside a caterpillar? Or the egg of a moth? it's not always easy to tell what's going on without destroying both species.

It's green, it's tiny, and everyone is hoping it doesn't wreak any havoc in the vineyards. "It" is the three-cornered alfalfa hopper, Spissistilus festinus, a lear-winged, wedge-shaped (thus the name "three-cornered") insect that's about a quarter of an inch long.