Rangelands

The annual UC Davis Bio Boot Camps not only connect youths with nature, but with each other. Meet Cole Cramer, and Connor Hsu, both 15, and both students at La Canada High School, La Caada Flintridge, Calif.

Back in 2010, UC Cooperative Extension apiculturist Eric Mussen (1944-2022) of the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, and yours truly, department communications specialist, wondered why no insects appear in "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Zero. Zilch. Nada.

If you have some free time during the holidays--free time, what's that?--and you're interested in insects, you'll want to watch a series of UC Davis insect "infomercials.

Suds for a bug? A bug for some suds? The annual Beer for a Butterfly contest, launched in 1972 by butterfly guru Art Shapiro, now a UC Davis distinguished professor emeritus, gets underway Jan. 1.

We're delighted that microbial ecologist Danielle Rutkowski, a UC Davis doctoral alumna and now a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Iowa State University, has just received a Royal Entomological Society Early Career Entomology Award, Highly Commended, for her research piece, Bee-Ass...

"When the Gorman Museum of Native American Art relocated to a new space, campus partners and students worked to make the grounds nearby home to the types of plants traditionally used by Indigenous cultures, such as white sage, a food also used in religious ceremonies, and yarrow, a medicinal herb.

What's not to like about a bug? And there are more of them to like than you think! About a million described species of insects inhabit our planet. That's about 80 percent of the world's species, scientists say.

If you collect insect specimens, can you spare a leg? It's for science.

It was good to see Sonoma County's "Queen Bee," Ettamarie Peterson of Petaluma, bee honored on the cover of the December edition of Bee Culture magazine. She often submits articles for the magazine. I decided it was time her to be featured and wrote a two-page article, illustrated with six images.

Farmers placed clumps of soil into metal mesh baskets, submerged the baskets into jars of water, then watched to see if their soil held together. The slake test, conducted at the Soil Health Field Day in Woodland, measured soil health.