Guest post 2: common milkweed buds and visitors

Click for greater clarity.

The last post showed flowers and beginning-to-open buds of Asclepias syriaca, known as common milkweed. Here’s an earlier stage, when the buds are still green. During the time I took pictures of these buds, some large black ants kept up their activity on them; what attracted the ants and what they were trying to accomplish, I don’t know.

This view, like the last, is from June 27 at the Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Lenox, Massachusetts.

© 2012 Steven Schwartzman