| "Uh-oh," Mommy said. "Look at these." Mommy turned the milkweed leaf over to reveal a perfectly ordered arrangement of tiny orange elliptical beads. "What is it, Mommy?" Shiloh wondered. "I don't know, but I know that they do not belong to the monarch butterfly." Mommy turned on her phone and searched for images of milkweed pests. Mommy scrolled through images while Shiloh looked on. "There they are!" they exclaimed. This is what they saw. |  |
Mommy and Shiloh discovered that those eggs were from the Milkweed Leaf Beetle. This bug looks sort of like a giant ladybug, but it doesn't have circle spots. Just as their name indicates, these bugs claim milkweed as their primary food source for their larva. And they are some ugly looking larva. Mommy noticed these beetles hanging out on the milkweed plants a couple of weeks earlier. They were mating. Now they were laying eggs. Can you spot the Milkweed Leaf Beetle in these two pictures?
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Unfortunately, we don't have enough milkweed to share with the Milkweed Leaf Beetle larvae if we want to raise Monarch butterflies, so Mommy removed the eggs and fed them to our quail. She left the beetle because it doesn't seem to do any damage to the plant. It's the larvae that greedily eat up many leaves.
Milkweed has many pests that want to eat it. We are watching our milkweed plants carefully. We keep them by the front door, so we can inspect them whenever we come or go from the house. We are guarding our milkweed for the Monarch butterflies. They will come from afar in late summer to lay eggs on the milkweed. We want to make sure there will be leaves available to the newborn caterpillars to eat when they arrive.
Protecting our milkweed plants from pests reminds me of a warning Jesus gave in Matthew 24:42-44: "Watch therefore, for you do not know what hour your Lord is coming. But know this, that if the master of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched and not allowed his house to be broken into. Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect" (NKJV). Jesus is coming back to this earth very soon. He wants us to watch and wait for Him. But, we must be careful. The devil wants to steal our hearts away from Jesus. Guard your heart with prayer, Bible study, and obedience. When you find the devil planting the greedy eggs of covetousness, pluck them out right away. Our sweet Jesus is worth the wait!
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