The Milkweeds' Last Act

My two favorite "milkweed places" provide entertainment and photo ops for a full six months every year. I stopped by my Lee Road spot yesterday and the exploding seedpods were beautiful. When a little wind came up and released some of the seeds I wished I was shooting video. Some hovered overhead for several minutes! Even this late in the season when the plants were dried up and brown, they were visited by several different kinds of insects.
My photography day actually began at Papa's Donuts where I took a few more photos of individual leaves of their great Black Oak trees. They are still about hlf green, but the day is fast approaching when the whole tree will be like a huge flame. I think that'll happen next week and you can see it here.
As for the milkweeds, seeing all these seeds makes me sad that their season is nearly over, but I get a thrill of anticipation when thinking ahead to April when the new green shoots will break ground. By June the peach-like fragrance of the flowers will keep me happy until the insects start to arrive. This past summer I saw only one Monarch Butterfly caterpillar and no adults. Also saw only one Red Milkweed Beetle and no Red Milkweed Bugs. Yes, there's a difference between a beetle and a bug (using the latter in the strict sense). During the summer of '09 I saw many of all three of these plus some interesting spiders. Hopefully this is a cyclic thing and I'll see more interesting bugs (in the non-strict sense) next summer. The milkweeds shown here are the Showy Milkweed, Asclepias speciosa. The other two local milkweeds are long gone for the season. They were the Purple Milkweed (AKA Heartleaf Milkweed), A. cordifolia, and the Narrowleaf Milkweed, A. fascicularis. They both host many of the same bugs but also some different ones.