Date: 04/29/2003

Number: 1

I just wanted to report my first monarch of the season in
Centerville, Ohio (south of Dayton). At 2:30 this afternoon I
watched a female laying eggs on my just-emerging milkweeds. She was obviously desperate for laying sites, because my tallest plant is less than 8 inches, and we now have at least 40 eggs on about 20 plants, most of them only an inch or two high and not yet unfurled. Oddly, she preferred the smaller plants, leaving several eggs on some of the new stalks and only one or two on the larger ones.

The female was only slightly ragged. I saw a notch in a back wing. She was very faded, though ... almost brown where she should have been black. Would she have come from the first 2003 generation (the one that hatched in Texas)?

Contributed by Monarch Watch

Centerville, OH

Latitude: 39.6 Longitude: -84.2

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