Yolo

As many students continue online learning due to COVID-19, 4-H hands-on learning activities are keeping them excited and engaged in education.

With planting season coming up, thinking about appropriate variety selection is key, and one of the first steps towards ensuring a good 2021 crop. Each year the California Rice Research Board funds a statewide variety trial testing program. Here I summarize some of that data.

ANR Staff Assembly's ANR GROWS program was so successful in 2020, they plan to offer it again this year, according to Marvin Flores, Staff Assembly chair for 2020-21.

Richard Rominger, former UC President's Advisory Commission member, passed away Dec. 20 in Winters. He was 93. In addition to his outstanding leadership at CDFA and USDA, Rich was always a great supporter and advisor to UC ANR.

The COVID-19 pandemic canceled the 2021 Beer-for-a-Butterfly Contest but sponsor Art Shapiro, UC Davis distinguished professor of evolution and ecology, found one for the record books. Shapiro spotted a cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, at 1:55 p.m. on Saturday, Jan.

Robbin Thorp would have been proud of what happened on Thursday, Jan. 14. When the UC Davis emeritus professor of entomology, a global authority on bumble bees, died June 7, 2019 at age 85, scientists found a way to memorialize him and what he loved.

A UC Davis postdoctoral researcher who studied with global bumble bee authority Robbin Thorp is fittingly the winner of the Bohart Museum of Entomology's inaugural Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble-Bee-of-the-Year Contest.

They're out there! Yes, after a l-o-n-g, cold, hard winter, bumble bees are emerging. At least in Solano County. At 11:20 a.m. today (Wednesday, Jan. 13), we spotted a yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, foraging on oxalis near downtown Benicia.

Seen any bumble bees lately in Yolo or Solano counties? If so, and if you photograph the first one of the year, you might win the Bohart Museum of Entomology's contest.

Be on the lookout for the first bumble bee of the year in Yolo and Solano counties.