Lesley Hamamoto (left) receives her prize for winning the 2026 Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble-Bee-of-the-Year Contest. With her are UC Davis Distinguished Professor Emerita Lynn Kimsey (center), who directed the Bohart Museum for 34 years, and Tabatha Yang, the Bohart Museum's education and outreach coordinator. Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey

SACRAMENTO REGION, CA (MPG) – Bumble bee enthusiast Lesley Hamamoto of Sacramento, who won the 2026 Robbin Thorp Memorial First-Bumble-Bee-of-the-Year Contest, received her prize – a Bohart Museum of Entomology coffee cup designed with the bumble bee that Thorp studied – on a recent visit to the Bohart Museum.

Presenting the award were UC Davis Distinguished Professor Emerita Lynn Kimsey, who directed the Bohart Museum for 34 years, and Tabatha Yang, the Bohart Museum's education and outreach coordinator.

Hamamato won the prize by being the first to photograph and submit the first bumble bee of the year in the contest. She photographed a black-tailed bumble bee, Bombus melanopygus, nectaring on manzanita at 9:59 a.m. Friday, Jan. 2 in the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden.

The contest rules specify that the first person to photograph or video a bumble bee in the two-county area of Yolo and Solano – and emails the image to the Bohart Museum – wins.

Hamamoto, a biologist/botanist with the Department of Water Resources, State of California since 2008, is a UC Davis alumna, and a former seven-year UC Davis employee. 

A bumble bee enthusiast and a native plant enthusiast, she's a volunteer with the California Bumble Bee Atlas and serves as the president of the Sacramento Valley Chapter of the California Native Plant Society.

The coffee cup is illustrated with the endangered Franklin's bumble bee, Bombus ranklini, that Thorp studied. He monitored the population in its California-Oregon border range for two decades, last seeing it in 2006. It is now feared extinct.

Hamamoto, as a freshman at UC Davis in 1998, completed a course, in ENT 10, "Natural History of Insects," taught by Thorp. She also took a class from Kimsey.

The bumble bee contest, launched in 2021, memorializes Professor Thorp (1933-2019), a tireless advocate of pollinator species protection and conservation and co-author of “Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide” (Princeton University) and “California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists” (Heyday).  Although he retired from the faculty in 1994 after 30 years of service, he continued his bee research until a week before he died, at age 85.  Every January, he looked forward to seeing the first bumble bee of the year.