Citizens of the Pods

Here are a few citizens of the milkweed pod city.

Look at all these milkweed bugs swarming over the milkweed seed pods. You can see quite a number of different instars of the same insect.

Basically every single pod on the milkweed plants are covered in these bugs.

This colony decided to inhabit the curly dead leaf instead of the pod. I took this in the morning so maybe they crawled into the folds of the leaf and are starting to come out to warm up in the sun.

This crew is crawling out of their night time hiding leaf.

This is a multi-tiered society. It seems like the youngest ones are on the left, the middle aged ones are on the lower right and the top right has the oldest ones. Maybe this is their form of school grades lol.

These guys are even inhabiting the pods that are starting to burst open with their cotton seeds.

Now for another group of citizens of the pods. These are orange aphids.

Here you can see that the orange aphids have killed the pods. The milkweed bugs don't kill the plant but the aphids do.

Orange aphids do serve a purpose even though they end up killing the plant. They serve as food for ladybugs and as hosts for tiny wasps. These bugs usually don't even move and clump together so they are easy to kill if you want to keep your milkweed plant alive. I prefer to buy a bunch of lady bugs and preying mantids from the hardware store and turn them loose on the aphids.

Here is a ladybug about to hunt down an adult aphid. Eventually these aphids grow up and fly around to other plants to lay eggs and are commonly nicknamed gnats. Sadly I saw no mantids this time around. Usually only tiny just hatched mantids go after aphids.