This report has gone viral:
http://www.science3point0.com/scienceblogs/category/animal-news-animal-planet/

We will likely be besieged by the public now wanting to know if this bee is
the cause of colony collapse!

For the facts, see http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/24881

DAVIS — The European wool carder bee is not the terrorist that some folks
think it is.

The pollinator doesn't cause colony collapse disorder (CCD). It's not a
newcomer to California. It doesn't have five stingers. And it doesn't target
honey bees leaving behind a "blood-soaked battlefield."

Entomologists at the University of California, Davis, are fielding a flurry
of phone calls and emails as a result of a Sacramento-based news story gone
viral. A Sacramento resident told an area TV station Jan. 24 that he
discovered the first-ever European wool carder bee in California on May 23,
2009, and that it targets honey bees: It "cuts off their wings, cuts off
their antenna, cuts off their heads, cuts off their torsi (tarsi) and stabs
them to death."

It's a pollinator and it does what pollinators do, say UC Davis
entomologists.

"The species *(Anthidium manicatum)* was first collected in Sunnyvale,
Calif. in 2007 and it was well established in the Central Valley by 2008,"
said entomologist Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of
Entomology<http://bohart.ucdavis.edu/> (home
of more than 7 million insect specimens, including wool carder bees) and
professor and former chair of the UC Davis Department of Entomology."

However, the above facts are unlikely to deter some groups from circulating
petitions to call for the destruction of this dangerous bee!

Randy Oliver

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