Bug Squad

Elizabeth Frost is at wick's end. When she's not tending the bees at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility at UC Davis or tending her own bees at home, she loves to make candles.

Next spring the Campus Buzzway at UC Davis will burst with buds, blooms and bees. The Campus Buzzway, a quarter-acre field of wildflowers, took root the third week of November when a crew planted golden poppies, lupine and coreopsis (tickseed).

A brush with a honey bee... A brush with a hummingbird... When we visited the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden recently, honey bees were nectaring the mutton bird sedge (Carex trifeda), a New Zealand native known for its upright floral spikes that resemble golden bottle brushes.

Youngsters like to joke about what a honey bee says when she returns to the hive: "Honey, I'm home!" Honey...what is it? The National Honey Board defines honey as "the substance made when the nectar and sweet deposits from plants are gathered, modified and stored in the honeycomb by honey bees.

Hear the buzz? That's the sound of a honey bee's wings moving at about 11,400 times per minute. As a field bee, the worker bee lives only several weeks during the peak nectaring season. She can fly four to five miles a day, at a speed of about 15 miles per hour.