Bug Squad

We're still in the throes of January but already UC Davis entomologist Diane Ullman and her colleagues are busily organizing two consecutive mid-May conferences at the Asilomar Conference Center, Pacific Grove.

Sunday, Feb. 8 is a Super Science Day! Visitors to the University of California, Davis campus can visit six museums at the fourth annual Biodiversity Museum Day. It's a week after Super Bowl Sunday, and by then all talk about deflated footballs may have ended.

The Beer-for-a-Butterfly contest is over. And we have a winner! Drum roll...Art Shapiro...

When the week is about butterflies instead of guerrilla attacks, murderous rampages, measles outbreaks, and deflated footballs, it's a good week. Butterflies draw smiles instead of scowls, pleasure instead of pain, glee instead of grief. So, here's Part 1 of the good news.

Where, oh where, is that first bumble bee of the year? It's about this time of the year when the queen black-tailed bumble bee, Bombus melanopygus, and the queen yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, emerge.