Wasps

One of the greatest things about living in Southern California is the ability to dine alfresco year-round. The downside? Bugs. Pesky bugs. Stinging bugs. Wasps. That's where the beautifully rustic and inexpensive hanging glass wasp catchers from the L.A.-based eco-friendly PriscillaWoolworth.com come in. Just fill the vessel with a little sugar water, and it will lure those pests away from your Prosecco. Wasps enter through a hole in the bottom, start drinking and get trapped. A 5-inch-tall wasp catcher, pictured here, is $5; an 8-inch-tall version is $10. Just for reference, a can of Raid wasp and hornet killer retails for about $7, and that isn't adding any ambience to a dinner party.

At first glance, two stories much in the news in Los Angeles of late would seem to have nothing to do with each other. The first concerns the fate of the Museum of Contemporary Art - whether it will affiliate with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or USC or the National Gallery in Washington - and the outsized role its primary benefactor, Eli Broad, is likely to play in the choice. The second concerns the low voter turnout in the first round of the city's mayoral election this month.

Social insects may not love their fellow bugs as much as once believed. "Altruistic" insects such as ants and bees are thought to sacrifice their own chance to reproduce in the name of the greater good — that way, their genes are passed down through the community's queen. But new research published this week in the journal Science explains why certain wasps, rather than set out to establish their own colony, choose to serve another queen completely unrelated to them. They do so for purely selfish reasons — because it gives them a shot at the throne in an already thriving hive.

Social insects may not love their fellow bugs as much as once believed. "Altruistic" insects such as ants and bees are thought to sacrifice their own chance to reproduce in the name of the greater good — that way, their genes are passed down through the community's queen. But new research published this week in the journal Science explains why certain wasps, rather than set out to establish their own colony, choose to serve another queen completely unrelated to them. They do so for purely selfish reasons — because it gives them a shot at the throne in an already thriving hive.

A swarm of yellow-jacket wasps stung 11 children playing at an elementary school Thursday. Teachers and county firefighters called to Viejo Elementary School in the 26700 block of Via Grande then "herded [the children] up, calmed them down and got them back inside," where they waited for parents to pick them up, said Emmy Day, spokeswoman for the Orange County Fire Authority. None were seriously injured, Day said.

California agricultural officials will release hundreds of tiny, stinger-less wasps this month to combat the fruit- and leaf-eating light-brown apple moth, in a move to find alternatives to aerial pesticide spraying. The California Department of Food and Agriculture will deploy the wasps, no bigger than a grain of rice, in San Luis Obispo and Sacramento counties and may expand the program to other counties with more serious infestations. The wasps lay their eggs inside light-brown apple moth eggs, where they incubate until the larvae emerge and kill the developing moths.

Scientists released thousands of tiny parasitic wasps over the fields of Texas' Rio Grande Valley on Monday in hopes that they will check the whitefly's appetite for vegetables and cotton. The microscopic, stingless wasps from Europe are harmless to humans and animals but deadly to many species of the whitefly, which feeds on a host of crops.

Scientists launched the first attack in a biological war against the ash whitefly Friday when they released 60 tiny parasitic wasps in a San Fernando Valley park. Perched atop ladders in Encino's Balboa Sports Center, researchers reached into nylon mesh bags that had been wrapped around branches of two infested trees and uncorked several narrow, inch-long vials containing the predators.

More than 20 people were treated for stings after two yellow jacket attacks Friday in Berkeley's Tilden Park. The first attack about 10 a.m. involved 12 schoolchildren and an adult on a hiking trail near Lake Anza, said Deputy Fire Chief Gary Bard. About Two hours later, wasps attacked nine people about a quarter-mile away. Injuries were considered minor.

Firefighters burning underbrush were attacked Thursday by a swarm of wasps and stung so badly they had to leave the job. A second crew was sent to continue the controlled burn near Stone Canyon Reservoir in the foothills above Bel-Air after the 9:30 a.m. incident, said city fire spokesman Jim Wells. "They were stung by yellow jackets--apparently they encountered a hive or something," Wells said. Three firefighters on a five-member crew were stung from two to six times each on the hands, legs, face and neck, Wells said.

California agricultural officials will release hundreds of tiny, stinger-less wasps this month to combat the fruit- and leaf-eating light-brown apple moth, in a move to find alternatives to aerial pesticide spraying. The California Department of Food and Agriculture will deploy the wasps, no bigger than a grain of rice, in San Luis Obispo and Sacramento counties and may expand the program to other counties with more serious infestations. The wasps lay their eggs inside light-brown apple moth eggs, where they incubate until the larvae emerge and kill the developing moths.

Jacob is a golden retriever. Like many goldens, his favorite activity is retrieving a tennis ball. We throw the ball; he brings it back and drops it at our feet. It can go on for hours. Actually, we don't know how long it could go on because we always give up before he does. But Jacob sometimes gets stuck when we play this game at my in-laws' pool. This is because of two fixed, internal rules he has. The first rule is that he must stay on land until he is as close as possible to the ball and then swim the rest of the way. The second rule is that he must enter the water gradually.

Violet Cowden never lost her love of flying, a passion born when she was a young girl envying the hawks soaring above her family's South Dakota farm in the 1920s. When she was a young first-grade teacher learning to fly out of an airfield in Spearfish, S.D., in the early 1940s, her students always knew when she had been flying because she was so happy. Her love of flying only increased when she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during World War II. And although her career as a pilot ended after her wartime service, her enthusiasm for flying never let up. Indeed, Cowden gleefully co-piloted a World War II-era P-51 Mustang with dual controls and flew from San Bernardino to Orange County last year when she was 93. As she put it in a 2010 documentary about her life in the sky: "I always say the worst thing about flying is coming back to earth.

Arizona hysteria Re "Arizona goes astray again," Editorial, May 18 The Times' writes that the complexion of Arizona is getting darker and darker. The only darkness hovering over Arizona is its foolish practice of racial profiling. Arizona stands as a shining example that mass hysteria has reared its ugly head again. Historical events such as the Salem witch trials, the Holocaust, the internment of Japanese Americans and McCarthyism exemplify the atrocities produced by this tragic theme.

WASP culture is dead! Long live WASP culture! Solicitor General Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court says a whole lot about the state of white Anglo Saxon Protestant culture in the U.S., but it's not what you think. If her appointment is approved, there will be no white — or any other color for that matter — Protestant on the court. Some joke that this means it's high time to carve out a WASP seat on the bench. Others suggest it spells the end of WASP dominance in general.

Tad Friend's "Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor" is a memoir of growing up in the once unassailable American ruling class -- and of a long personal struggle to shed some of the emotional baggage such a lineage conferred. As one would expect from the author of the New Yorker magazine's deftly observed "Letters From California," Friend's recollections of WASP America in the throes of decline are frequently amusing, carefully modulated, occasionally wearying and unfailingly stylish.

A colony of cannibalistic ants discovered in Madagascar represents an important piece of the puzzle in understanding the evolution and behavior of one of the most successful insect species in the world, scientists report in today's Nature. The insects, dubbed "Dracula ants" by their discoverers because they suck nourishment from their own larvae, are believed to be a transitional species bridging the gap between ants and the wasps from which they evolved millions of years ago.

Agricultural crews are releasing tiny stingless wasps in Southern California this week as a weapon against the ash whitefly parasite, the state Department of Food and Agriculture said. Pesticides are ineffective and the fly has no known natural enemy in California. The speck-sized wasp is the first biological weapon to be used against the ash whitefly in California, where it was first detected in Los Angeles County in August, 1988.

One of the greatest things about living in Southern California is the ability to dine alfresco year-round. The downside? Bugs. Pesky bugs. Stinging bugs. Wasps. That's where the beautifully rustic and inexpensive hanging glass wasp catchers from the L.A.-based eco-friendly PriscillaWoolworth.com come in. Just fill the vessel with a little sugar water, and it will lure those pests away from your Prosecco. Wasps enter through a hole in the bottom, start drinking and get trapped. A 5-inch-tall wasp catcher, pictured here, is $5; an 8-inch-tall version is $10. Just for reference, a can of Raid wasp and hornet killer retails for about $7, and that isn't adding any ambience to a dinner party.

Scientists have discovered a planet that shouldn't exist. The finding, they say, could alter our understanding of orbital dynamics, a field considered pretty well settled since the time of astronomer Johannes Kepler 400 years ago. The planet is known as a "hot Jupiter," a gas giant orbiting the star Wasp-18, about 330 light years from Earth. The planet, Wasp-18b, is so close to the star that it completes a full orbit (its "year") in less than an Earth day, according to the research, which was published in the journal Nature.