Wednesday, August 17, 2011

My Monarch Meadow

Proof, that the Hummingbirds have been visiting my yard all year and aren't just in my head! They've even featured in a short video I made, towards the end.


We open with a variety of carpenter ant tending some aphids. Camponotus chromaiodes is similar to C. pennsylvanicus but has red on 2/3rds of the mesosoma. I have never seen ants tending the aphids on milkweed before. Normally the aphids seem to overrun the plant, eventually causing the stem to turn a brilliant yellow orange from the sheer number. So I thought this was neat to find. Part of the reason might be this is a young colony in my yard that's only recently grown to about 50 workers this past year.

While naming the video I came up with the phrase Monarch Meadow. And I thought wow, that is so catchy that it has to be a real place. Surely some nature preserve somewhere has coined it already. So I googled it and sure enough there is a place named that!



And it's the most boring place on earth. This is The Best example of a place with the wrong name. Perhaps you've driven past an Oak Drive and noticed the lack of oak, or a Poplar terrace that doesn't have any tulip or poplar trees. There's a place near me called The Meadows who's mostly paved apartment complex. What do Monarchs have to do with this place? Sure they could mean it in a sovereignty sense but even then sharing an apartment complex, each with it's own Washer and Dryer (gasp), doesn't exactly scream royalty. 

A google image search doesn't yield much better results. In fact you don't need to scroll that far down the results before coming across one of my images.

I'm surprised Prairie Moon Nursery, or Prairie Nursery haven't marketed some kind of garden package with preselected Monarch plants.