I’m not much of a gardener. I obviously love beautiful plants and flowers, but I’ve never been much of a green thumb. Some of that may have to do with not having time to do much to care for the poor plants that do end up here. But I do have several friends who love to garden and spend hours and hours caring for their gorgeous plants and flowers. A common garden plant in this area is milkweed. It produces beautiful flowers, and those flowers are very attractive to butterflies. One of my friends had some really nice milkweed plants one spring but by July they weren’t looking so hot. I’d gone over one afternoon to shoot some photos and in the process, I accidentally discovered her problem.

On the leaves and stems of her milkweed plants, were a bunch of small dark bugs. I got out my macro lens to get a closer look (and shoot some photos, of course!). The plants with the bugs had damaged leaves and a lot of damage in lines on the stems. A thorough search of the garden showed that the bugs were only on the milkweed plants. We put one of the pictures I’d taken into the Picture Insect app and found out that the bugs were milkweed stem weevils.

The weevils live only on milkweed plants. The young adults eat and damage the plant’s leaves. Once they grow to maturity, the females lay their eggs in a series of small holes that they chew into the stem of the plant. When the larvae hatch out, they feed on the juices and tissue of the plant, causing even more damage. When large enough, the larvae fall off the plant and pupate in the dirt. A second generation of adults emerge in the late summer and lay their eggs in the seed pods. The larvae damage the pods, destroy the seeds, and keep any healthy seeds from being properly dispersed. When ready, these larvae also fall off the plant into the soil. The pupae and any remaining adults winter in the soil to return in the late spring to start all over again.

Now, my friend didn’t want to use insecticides on her plants for several reasons, including not wanting to harm the butterflies they were planted to attract. Instead, because the weevils only live on milkweed, the next year she planted other plants where the milkweed had been. It seems to have worked beautifully. The past two years, the new plants have done well where the milkweed was, and the new milkweed, in a very distant part of the yard, has also done great.