Date: 05/14/2012

Number: 1

We have had over 5" of rain in a period of about 4-5 days within the past week.

It's really helped our vegetation return to lovely shades of green again.

Our native asperula milkweed has returned and is once again visible in the fields.

We have only had occasional sighting of monarchs over the past week.

The rain slowed down most of the activity but the daily sightings have definitely decreased.

A few days we have had no sightings at all and then we would see one or two.

The exception to that was Mothers Day this past weekend.

We saw several male monarchs in the fields around us that day mostly nectaring on the purple thistle blooms.

When we returned to our home late morning and were inspecting our milkweed, a female monarch appeared in our milkweed patch.

She was a somewhat faded new generation monarch.

She glided among us and then paying us no mind she visited almost every milkweed we had in that area.

She left eggs on dozens of plants over the course of the next 3-4 hours as she circled our home numerous times.

We have counted almost 60 eggs thus far but we are still finding them around our yard.

That was quite a Mothers Day treat!!

Our milkweed has surged with the recent rains and sunshine.

We still had monarch larvae feeding on it over the last several days and with the recent egg delivery we'll be needing every bit of it!!

We've also seen quite a few Queen larvae in our milkweed but have only spotted 1 or 2 in flight.



We have observed quite a few more spiders and flies within the past few weeks.

Their number have increased since earlier this spring and they are much more noticeable in the milkweed patch.

Driftwood, TX

Latitude: 30.1 Longitude: -98

Observed by: Chuck
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