Wonder what they are? Post some pictures and I'll see what I can do. I make no promises about giving you species names, but I might be able to give you a general idea of what you're seeing. I've seen some smaller, tiny bees on the rose leaves also. There are MANY species of solitary bees, and most of them are very small. They're probably interested in collecting rose pollen to feed to their babies. It's not unusual for bees like this to collect pollen & nectar, make a ball out of the pollen (using the nectar as the binding agent), lay an egg on the ball, and then seal the whole thing inside a chamber and do it all over again in the next part of the tunnels they've already created. Native solitary bee species often live that way. The babies take a year to become adults, and so show up the following year to repeat the cycle. Some parts of the season they seem more agressive than others. Yellow jackets are more aggressive in late summer/early autumn because their source of food in the nest is diminishing. After they feed those killed insects to the babies back in the nest the babies secret a sugary fluid which the adults eat as food. That works great at this time year since the nest is growing in population and so there are more babies on the way then there are adults now (creating a situation in the nest where the adults have access to lots of food). By the end of the summer the queen isn't laying so many eggs as now, and so there are lots of adults, but fewer babies to rear (and thus less food in the nest for the adults). That means the adults have to look for sugary stuff outside the nest to satiate their hunger. That's why they become an aggressive nuisance at Labor Day cookouts & picnics.

>Other question: Do rose slugs only feed from the underside of the leaf??? Has anyone every spotted them on the top side of leaves or on the canes??? Jim, my memory is incomplete. I might have seen some on the tops of leaves, but if so, that's not the most common place to find them. For sure I've seen a zillion of them on the canes, as well as the undersides of leaves. I've also seen multiple times when canes were chewed all the way around, sometimes leaving just a thin thread holding the upper part of the cane still attached but hanging down totally upside down. And I've often seen long, often not so shallow, chewing cuts into the cane, going down or up the cane from somewhere in midcane. Usually, but not always, this results in the cane turning totally black throughout that cane area, necessitating that that dead cane be cut off and sealed. And if I didn't seal the ends of any sizable cut cane, that cane would become black fairly quickly and have to be cut again and sealed. Lots and lots of that happening here, starting in April and going on well into the fall. Until the start of Rose Rosette Disease here, this was by far the #1 problem for our roses--with blackspot, cercospora or anything else not even coming close. My theory is that because our yard has lots of woods and also some pretty low damp areas (especially last year when we had an unusual amount of steady rain throughout the summer instead of drought) it has or had conditions especially liked by sawflies. >I even found an article with the exact picture... I don't think I remember ours being curled around, though some might have done that and I was just focused on the straight kind. Using photographs, I've seen many, many straight ones climbing canes and on stems. They are hard to notice with the naked eye, but enlarging pictures on the computer screen works wonders. I don't have pictures of the undersides of leaves, but for those I turned over, I could notice them with the naked eye better... and there were a lot of those there too. == >I've used iron phosphate products for slugs and snails and it works, but I don't think it's effective for the sawfly larvae. Thanks for your information, Hoovb. Oh, well! We already do have the product, so we'll give it a try anyway, hoping that our varieties are a bit different than yours. Grasping at straws here, I know... The roses I started trying the product out with a couple of weeks ago have already succumbed to RRD, though, so I've no idea thus far on whether there's any chance that it might work here. Your post inspired me to actually read the label (novel idea!) and I did not see any of the specific types of slugs mentioned there that I could find in one of my books as some of the sawfly slug varieties that can affect roses, so your experience might well predict ours too. On the optimistic side, though, it does say that those particular varieties listed aren't the only kinds of slugs it will work with, and mentions also that it's effective for slugs on blueberries and apple trees (plants with some relationship to roses, I think). Anyway, we'll see... assuming that by the time RRD is finished with us here we have some roses left to try the product on. Oh, I did read one other interesting thing: if you don't want to pick each and every one off by hand--no chance!--one of my books says that a strong spray with the hose will work. I don't know what percentage will have the strength to climb back up, but the spray coming from the side will at least put them at some distance away from the cane (and for all our new roses in the pots, they'd have to climb the pots too). I've been mainly doing that for aphids, but it will certainly be a bonus if it helps with rose sawflies too! Best wishes, Mary

Are these new plants? Or established? If they are established plants I would make an educated guess at giving them a nitrogen boost to help them recover their lost foliage quicker. The rose slugs are indeed grubs...but not caterpillars. As such, applications of something like bT would not be effective. Contact insecticides are supposed to work against them, but they work against the good guys, too, including pollinators. I am battling them, but they are not overwhelming. My plan is to get some good host plants going and introduce biological controls like predatory bugs. Hopefully the garden will find an equilibrium.

Aphids are easily dispatched by a sharp stream of water, however, since there can be several generations already there by the time you see one you will need to repeat that several times. The Aphids do not return but other generations do appear. If those "worms" are small, green, slug like thingys they are sawfly larva, aka rose slugs, and they eat holes in the leaves. If not too many squishing them is quite effective. If lots then careful use of Neem Oil products can be tried as can hosing them off. Pyrethrin based sprays or dusts are also effective if used with care since they are very broad spectrum poisons. Lady Bug larva are voracious eaters of Aphids, but are also easily killed off by most of the pesticides we have, which is why care is needed in application. Nematodes live in the soil so they will not be of much use in control of insects on plants.