A yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii, nectaring on Eryngium. Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey

YOLO COUNTY, CA (MPG) - Who will find and photograph the first bumble bee of the year?

The sixth annual Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble Bee-of-the-Year Contest officially began at 12:01 a.m. Jan. 1, 2026. The first person to photograph or video a bumble bee in the two-county area of Solano and Yolo and send to the Bohart Museum of Entomology at [email protected] will win a coffee cup designed with the endangered Franklin's bumble bee, the bee that Thorp monitored on the California-Oregon border for decades.

The entries must include the time, date and place.

The contest, launched in 2021, memorializes Professor Thorp (1933-2019), a global authority on bees and a UC Davis distinguished emeritus professor of entomology, who died June 7, 2019, at age 85. A 30-year member of the UC Davis faculty, he retired in 1994 but continued working until several weeks before his death. Every year he looked forward to seeing the first bumble bee in the area.

The black-tailed bumble bee, Bombus melanopygus, is usually the first bumble bee to emerge in this area, Thorp used to say. It forages on manzanitas, wild lilacs, wild buckwheats, lupines, penstemons, clovers, and sages, among others.

The 2025 Robbin Thorp Bumble Bee Memorial Contest was won by Michael Kwong of Sacramento and Kaylen Teves of Vallejo, Monarch Watch volunteers who photographed a yellow-faced bumble bee (Bombus vosnesenskii) on an oak leaf at the Glen Cove Marina, Vallejo on Jan. 11 while they were looking for monarchs. At the time, Teves was a computer science student at San Francisco State University, and Kwong, a senior environmental scientist with the State of California.

In 2024, Nancy Hansen of Fairfield, who photographed a black-tailed bumble bee, B. melanopygus, in her yard at 10:57 a.m., Monday, Jan. 1.

In 2023, Ria deGrassi of Davis photographed a B. melanopygus at 12:32, Jan. 8 on a ceanothus in her yard.

In 2022, there was a tie between Maureen Page, then a doctoral candidate in the lab of pollination ecologist Neal Williams, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology; and Ellen Zagory of Davis, retired director of public horticulture for the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden. Each photographed a bumble bee on manzanita in the Arboretum at 2:30 p.m., Jan. 1. Page photographed a B. melanopygus, while Zagory captured an image of the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenskii.

In 2021, UC Davis postdoctoral researcher Charlie Casey Nicholson, then of the Williams lab and the Elina Lastro Niño lab, photographed a B. melanopygus at 3:10 p.m., Jan. 14 in a manzanita patch in the Arboretum.