Bug Squad

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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/bugsquad/index.cfm. The story behind "The Sting" is here: https://my.ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=7735.

CHEMICAL ECOLOGISTS Walter Leal (left), professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, and postdoctoral researcher Zain Syed, at work in the Walter Leal lab. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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The SWAT Team

October 27, 2009

Chemical ecologist Walter Leal, professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology, and his postdoctoral researcher Zain Syed have done it again. In August of 2008, they discovered the secret mode of the insect repellent, DEET.

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SHARING A LAVENDER are an Italian bee (left) and a Carniolan bee, two races of the species Apis mellifera. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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Racing for the Lavender

October 26, 2009

A bee is a bee is a bee? Poet Gertrude Stein ("a rose is a rose is a rose") could have said that. True, there's only one species of honey bee in the United States--Apis mellifera, the Western or European honey bee--but there are several races.

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SPORTING the new honey bee t-shirts they created to raise funds for honey bee research at UC Davis are Nanase Nakanishi (left), an animal science major and a student employee at the Bohart Museum of Entomology, and Fran Keller, a doctoral student in entomology. Nanase models the front, and Fran, the back. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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Saving the Bees, One Shirt at a Time

October 23, 2009

Officials at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and the Bohart Museum of Entomology are saving the bees--one T-shirt at a time.

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NOCTUID CUTWORM, soon to be a dull brown moth, crawls on a yarrow at the Storer Garden, UC Davis. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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Cutting It

October 22, 2009

The dull brown moth may be dull-looking but as noctuid cutworms they're not. We spotted this noctuid cutworm, soon to be a dull brown moth, last week on a yarrow in the Storer Gardens at the University of California, Davis.

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NEWLY EMERGED BEE at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, UC Davis. Bees like this are now welcome in Allendale, N.J., thanks to the successful efforts of beekeeper Dianne DiBlasi to lift a ban on backyard beekeeping. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)

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Bee-lieve!

October 21, 2009

Dianne DiBlasi did it. Back in January, we wrote a Bug Squad blog about Dianne DiBlasis three-year effort to overturn an Allendale, N.J. ban on backyard beekeeping. DiBlasi, who leads a group of teen environmentalists known as Team B.E.E.S.

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