Hummingbird and Butterfly Gardening: Daily pictures #96, 1 by sunkissed

sunkissed wrote:
Bruce that was great, I enjoyed the series of photos shots.

I have lots of tiger swallowtails here. Of course Monarchs, and now I see some good sized cats again on my milkweed. A few Zebras, which I didn't ever see any last year, but no way near the amount I had two years ago. Not seeing any sulphurs lately, but did early spring. Lots of little moths.

I asked about the Milkweed bug awhile back. Until this year I've never seen them on my milkweed. I wondered if they were a "good bug" or "bad bug". Someone did respond that they didn't pay much attention to them and just let them be. I let them go for now an just ignored them, after all I couldn't really see they were harming anything. One or two of them quickly turned into more than a dozen and they kept getting larger. I started to notice my seed pods on my milkweeds were turning yellow, and eventually all withered up and never released seeds. I did some research and soon discovered these bugs are seed sap-suckers. I depend on milkweed that so easily re-seeds all over my garden as a host plant for my Monarchs. So I decided they are "bad bugs" and easily within a few minutes destroyed each one of them. They try to out run, but I easily could grab them and they met between my foot and the pavement. I lost all my seeds and will only hope new seeds will emerge in time to give me some more plants for the season. I now look for these bugs and won't allow them in my garden anymore.