Yolo

If you want to learn about bees--and learn it from the experts--The Bee Course is the place to be. It's an annual workshop held at the Southwestern Research Station (SWRS) in Portal, Ariz.

Breaking news shook the agricultural world today. The Mediterranean fruit fly, considered the world's worst agricultural pest, is one of at least five fruit flies established in California. It cannot be eradicated.

You can tell it's summer along Yolo County roads by the acres and acres of sunflower fields. Looking like real-life Van Gogh paintings (Van Gogh painted them in vases, Mother Nature paints them in rows), the sunflower fields are nothing short of spectacular.

According to a previous ANR blog post, the 2013 processing tomato crop in California is experiencing worse-than-usual curly top problems, which is caused by a complex of Beet Curly Top Viruses (BCTVs) (Processing tomatoes face critical threat: curly top).

The scrub jays are just doing their job. But they're doing it too well. The gulf frittillary butterflies (Agraulis vanillae) are mating and depositing their eggs on our passion flower vines--as we want them to do--but complete metamorphosis always seems to be incomplete.

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.

Ah, what an intoxicating scent! If you've ever been around the winter daphne, Daphne odora, cultivar "Aureomarginata," you know that its aroma precedes it. You'll ask "What's that fragrance?" before you even see the showy pink-and-white blossoms and its green leaves edged in gold.

It's not often that "beer, butterfly and Obama" land in the same sentence. But such was the case Monday, Jan. 21 for butterfly expert Art Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology at the University of California, Davis.

They're on to something. Definitely. An international research team has been researching honey bee pollination of almonds in the three-county area of Yolo, Colusa and Stanislaus since 2008, and what these scientists have discovered is astounding.

Talk about an early bloomer! At least one almond tree was blooming in California on the first day of the year. In the Benicia State Recreation Area, to be exact. We spotted the almond tree flowering on Jan. 1 near the entrance to the state park.