Bug Squad

Bumble bee on bull thistle at Bodega Bay

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UC ANR is renovating its website. The Bug Squad blog, by Kathy Keatley Garvey of the University of California, Davis, is a daily (Monday-Friday) blog launched Aug. 6, 2008. It is about the wonderful world of insects and the entomologists who study them. Blog posts are archived at https://my.ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/archive.cfm

Hillary Thomas is studying the saltcedar beetle (Diorhabda elongata): a good bug on a bad weed. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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Good Bug, Bad Weed

August 20, 2008

Hillary Thomas' biological control research on a leaf-eating beetle that targets saltcedar has scored a bullseye. Thomas, a doctoral candidate in entomology at UC Davis, has received a $15,000 Robert and Peggy van den Bosch Memorial Scholarship to support her research.

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Svastra obliqua expurgata (Cockerell) leaves the flower. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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Carrying a Lot of 'Baggage'

August 19, 2008

If she were boarding an airline, she'd be charged double for baggage. But she didn't and she wasn't. She's a pollen-packed sunflower bee enjoying our sunflower. Not a honey bee but a sunflower bee. A native bee.

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Culex quinquefasciatus, the Southern house mosquito, finishes feeding on non-DEET treated skin. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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The Secret's Out

August 18, 2008

We know it works, but how? Just how does DEET work? Does it jam the senses of a mosquito? Does it mask the smell of the host? You spray the chemical repellent on your arm and thankfully, those darn skeeters leave you alone.

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Mediterranean fruit fly (Photo by Jack Kelly Clark)

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Medfly Wars

August 15, 2008

The war is overagain, wrote reporter Pat Brennan of the Orange County Register in a news article published Aug. 14. Brennan was referring to the war against the Mediterranean fruit fly, a tiny pest that targets some 260 crops.

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This male carpenter bee (Xylocopa tabaniformis orpifex Smith NB) visits salvia (sage). (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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If I Were a Carpenter...Bee

August 14, 2008

I've got black bumblebees buzzing around our backyard like crazy, the caller said. They're loud. Very loud. They're dive-bombing and scaring the cat and dog. I've never seen anything like this before. The unwelcome visitors were not bumblebees. They were carpenter bees.

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