Bug Squad

If you haven't made it over to the Hagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven on Bee Biology Road, UC Davis, yet this year, you should. The trees that form "Orchard Alley" are blooming. You'll see almonds and plums flowering, and soon, apples. Really spectacular are the delicate plum blossoms.

People aren't the only ones favoring fava beans. Fava beans growing in a raised bed in the Hagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven on Bee Biology Road, UC Davis, are attracting honey bees, European paper wasps, lacewings, ladybugs, aphids and carpenter bees.

There's a good reason why jumping spiders are named "jumping spiders." They jump. A jumping spider, according to National Geographic, can jump 50 times its body length. We saw this jumping spider (family, Salticidae and probably genus Phidippus) in our flower bed last weekend.

It's a good cause. The seventh annual Bee Symposium, a fundraiser for Partners for Sustainable Pollination, will take place on Saturday, March 9 in Sebastopol. That's when five speakers will talk about pollinator habitat--what's good to plant and why. The theme is "Pollinator Habitat and Forage.

If you love to watch pollinators at work in your garden--especially the honey bees and the bumble bees--first you have to provide the plants. Promise yourself to plant pollinator plants periodically. But which ones? The UC Davis Arboretum staff gets asked that question a lot.