Yolo

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.

What's stressing our honey bees and how are they impacted? You'll learn more about honey bees if you attend the Crop Pollination Workshop next month.

Have you seen me? Me, being a cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae)? No? No one else has, either. Art Shapiro, distinguished professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis, is looking and waiting.

In case you've forgotten amid all the horn-blowing, champagne-sipping and singing of "Auld Lang Syne," the search is still on to collect the first cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) of 2015 in the three county-area of Yolo, Sacramento and Solano.

DAVIS--A beer for a butterfly. If you collect the first live cabbage white butterfly (Pieris rapae) of 2015 in Yolo, Sacramento or Solano counties and have it verified as the winner, you'll get a pitcher of beer or its equivalent.

The late comedian Rodney Dangerfield would have liked male ants. It was Dangerfield (1921-2004), you know, who coined the catchphrase, "I don't get no respect.

Curious about those insect-eating bats? Yolo County Farm Advisor Rachael Freeman Long, who has been researching and writing about bats for 20 years, has two colonies of bats at her ranch in Woodland.

Most of us think about bats at least twice a year: during National Pollinator Week, when bees, beetles, butterflies and bats beckon, and on Halloween, when bats mingle with the witches, ghosts, ghouls, goblins and other things that go bump in the night. Bats are pollinators? Definitely.

If you see a white cabbage butterfly fluttering by you, net it. The Pieris Project wants it.

Female (top), male and female in copulation (middle) and a mature nymph (bottom) of Bagrada bug on a dime. (Photo by Surendra Dara) Bagrada bug (Bagrada hilaris) is an invasive pest that was first reported in California in 2008 in Los Angeles County.