Its flowers are typical milkweed flowers \u2013 a corona of five parts (hoods) with curved petals below and curved, nectar-secreting horns above.\u00a0The flowers are tricky \u2013 sticky, golden, saddlebag-shaped pollinia are hidden behind what one author calls a trap door (a\u00a0stigmatic slit<\/em>).\u00a0Insects walk around on the flower head, and when one of their feet slips through the slit by chance, a pollinium sticks to it.\u00a0When the bug encounters a stigmatic slit on the next plant it visits, the pollen is inadvertently delivered.\u00a0A quick-and-dirty, pick-up and delivery is what the plant had in mind; but, like the story of the raccoon (or was it a monkey) that reaches into the jar for a candy bar and then can\u2019t pull its fist out of the small opening, sometimes the insect\u2019s foot gets stuck to pollinia inside the trap door. Insects that can\u2019t free themselves will die dangling from the flower, and insects that escape may be gummed up by the waxy structures.\u00a0 Look carefully for pollinia in the pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Milkweeds support complex communities of invertebrates – their nectar attracts ants, bugs, beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, bees, and wasps, plus predators looking for a meal.\u00a0Here are some of the insects that the BugLady sees on Swamp milkweed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TWO-BANDED PETROPHILA MOTHS (Petrophila<\/em>\u00a0bifascialis<\/em>) are delicate moths that lead a double life.\u00a0By day, they sit sedately on streamside vegetation. By night, the female crawls down the side of a rock into the water \u2013 sometimes several feet down \u2013 to deposit her eggs on the stream bottom, breathing air that she brings with her, held against her ventral surface (\u201cPetrophila<\/em>\u201d means \u201crock-lover<\/em>\u201d). Her larvae eventually attach themselves to a rock and spin a net to keep themselves there, feeding on diatoms and algae that they harvest from the rock\u2019s surface with their mandibles.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n MULBERRY WING SKIPPER \u2013 A small (one-inch-ish wingspan) butterfly of wetlands with an arrow or airplane-shaped marking on its rich, chestnut-brown underwings (the upper surface of its wings looks completely different<\/a>).\u00a0Adults fly slowly through low vegetation, where females lay their eggs on the leaves of sedges.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n FLOWER LONGHORN BEETLE\u00a0BRACHYLEPTURA\u00a0CHAMPLAINI\u00a0(no common name), on a Swamp milkweed leaf<\/em>. Other than a \u201cpresent\u201d checkoff in a variety of natural area insect surveys, there\u2019s just about nothing online about this beetle, and not much more in Evans\u2019 book,\u00a0Beetles of Eastern North America<\/span>. It\u2019s a long-horned beetle in the Flower longhorn subfamily\u00a0Lepturinae, a group that feeds on pollen in the daytime. This one has pollinia on its mouthparts.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n AMBUSH BUG \u2013 The dangling bee in this picture did not fall victim to the sticky pollinia (though it has plenty of them on its legs). A well-camouflaged ambush bug snagged it as it visited the flower.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n SOLDIER BEETLE \u2013 These guys drive the BugLady crazy.\u00a0They\u2019re lightning beetle mimics, and they\u2019re pretty good at it, and she always overthinks the ID.\u00a0She doesn\u2019t know why they\u2019re imitating the closely-related lightning beetles \u2013 alarmed lightning beetles discharge poisonous blood\/hemolymph from their leg joints, but alarmed soldier beetles do, too.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n CRAB SPIDER \u2013This Goldenrod crab spider tucked itself down between the milkweed flowers and ambushed an\u00a0Odontomyia<\/em>\u00a0soldier fly<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n LARGE MILKWEED BUG \u2013 What a beauty!\u00a0Large milkweed bugs are seed bugs \u2013 they feed by poking their beaklike mouthparts through the shell of a milkweed pod and sucking nutrients from the seeds.\u00a0They don\u2019t harm the plant (just the seed crop), and they don\u2019t harm monarch caterpillars, either.\u00a0Like other milkweed feeders, they sport aposematic (warning) colors to inform predators of their unpalatability.\u00a0Large milkweed bugs don\u2019t like northern winters and are migratory \u2013 like monarchs, the shortening day lengths, the lowering angle of the sun, and increasingly tough milkweed leaves signal that it\u2019s time to go, and they travel south to find fresher greens.\u00a0Their descendants head north in spring.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n MONARCH CATERPILLAR \u2013 Common milkweed and Swamp milkweed are Monarch butterflies\u2019 top picks for egg laying.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n GREAT-SPANGLED FRITILLARY \u2013 The other big, orange butterfly.\u00a0Adults enjoy milkweeds and a variety of other wildflowers, and their caterpillars feed on violets \u2013 if they\u2019re lucky enough to connect with some. Females lay eggs in fall, near, but not necessarily\u00a0on<\/em>, violets, and the caterpillars emerge soon afterward. They drink water but they don\u2019t eat; they aestivate through winter in the leaf litter and awake in spring to look for their emerging host plants.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n GIANT SWALLOWTAIL \u2013 A southern butterfly that seems to be getting a foothold in Wisconsin.\u00a0The book says they are annual migrants that produce a generation here in summer and that their caterpillars can\u2019t tolerate Wisconsin winters, but the BugLady has seen very fresh-looking Giant Swallowtails here in May that didn\u2019t look like they had just been on a long flight. Their caterpillars are called Orange Dogs in the South, because their host plants are in the Rue\/Citrus family Rutaceae.\u00a0In this neck of the woods, females lay their eggs on Prickly ash, a small shrub that\u2019s the northernmost member of that family.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n CINNAMON CLEARWING MOTH \u2013 A nectar-sipper but, since it doesn\u2019t land, not a serious pollinator.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n NORTHERN PAPER WASP \u2013 Butterflies love Swamp Milkweed, and so do wasps.\u00a0The Northern paper wasp is the social wasp that makes a smallish (usually fewer than 200 inhabitants) open-celled, down-facing, stemmed nest<\/a>.\u00a0\u201cNorthern\u201d is a misnomer \u2013 they\u2019re found from Canada through Texas and from the Atlantic well into the Great Plains.\u00a0Her super power is chewing on cellulose material, mixing it with saliva, and creating paper pulp.\u00a0She may be on the swamp milkweed to get pollen and nectar for herself or to collect small invertebrates to feed to the colony\u2019s larvae.\u00a0Curious about Northern paper wasps?\u00a0See more here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n Also seen were ants, leafcutter bees, sweat bees, Great black wasps, Great golden digger wasps, Red soldier beetles, Fiery and Broad-winged Skipper butterflies, and Thick-headed flies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The BugLady<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n Note: All the links leave to external site. Howdy, BugFans, The BugLady is already fantasizing about warm, sunny days in a wetland, photographing Swamp milkweed (and dragonflies), because she loves its color, and she loves being in wetlands, and because …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32664,"featured_media":14433,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[8],"tags":[694,127,238,30,607,484,158,721,701,80,716,612,720,719,614,718,486,79,715,722,661,587,717,31,713,714,91,442],"class_list":["post-14419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bug-of-the-week","tag-ambush-bug","tag-ants","tag-bees","tag-beetles","tag-bugs","tag-butterfly","tag-caterpillars","tag-cinnamon-clearwing-moth","tag-crab-spider","tag-flies","tag-flower-longhorn-beetle","tag-flowers","tag-giant-swallowtail","tag-great-spangled-frtillary","tag-insects","tag-large-milkweed-bug","tag-monarch-caterpillar","tag-moths","tag-mulberry-wing-skipper","tag-northern-paper-wasp","tag-plants","tag-pollinators","tag-soldier-beetle","tag-spiders","tag-swamp-milkweed","tag-two-banded-petrophila-moths","tag-wasps","tag-worms"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Moths](\"https:\/\/uwm.edu\/field-station\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/380\/2023\/10\/2-banded-petrophilla14-1.jpg\")
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