Thanks for the response! They've been in pots since early spring 2013. They are already a few years old and produced for me last year. I did water them during our heat wave last week. They are in resin gray pots and drain well.

fman: Sounds like you have aphids. These are common and not usually damaging unless they are very heavy. Use a strong water spray to wash them off. If that doesn't work well enough try insecticidal soap. There is also a product sold to bee keepers that is very safe called Sucrocide. It will kill aphids and mites on contact. It breaks down to sugar and fat once the spray dries. Very safe to trees and mammals. The Fruitnut

To tell the truth, unless the containers are absolutely humongous, if the apple trees and roses are in the same pot, both will be fighting for resources. So, how about leaving the roses as is, cutting off the dead apples, then plant new columnar apples in new containers.

My friend, Fred, has a huge apricot tree in his back yard. It is so tall that in the years when it makes a crop, you have to use the tallest ladder you have to harvest it. I assume if he had pruned it early in its life, it wouldn't have gotten so tall and unmanageable. It doesn't make a crop often, but when it does, the crop is huge and fresh apricots are so tasty. When Fred was in his mid-80s, as a concession to the advancing years, he bought some new fruit trees and planted them, and I believe they all were dwarfs. I've never planted an apricot tree here, but just thinking about his makes me want to plant one. He's 92 or 93 now and I would imagine those dwarf trees are producing fruit for him now, though he hasn't mentioned them lately and I haven't asked. I'm considering turning the big back garden into an orchard next year. It would be a whole lot easier to plant dwarf fruit trees in hardware-cloth root cages to protect them from the voles that are so bad back in that sandy soil than to fight the voles every year when they randomly start eating almost every vegetable crop. The only other option for keeping that big fenced area as a garden would be to build hardware cloth-lined raised beds, and after spending the last 18 years building raised beds in the front garden bit by bit, I'm not feeling highly motivated to start the whole routine all over again with the back garden. I have been leaning strongly towards turning the back garden into a fruit garden with fruit trees and blackberries grown with their roots in cages and with a hardware-cloth lined raised bed for strawberries. Maybe I'd leave a small portion of it for veggies because I do like growing all the vining veggies on that 8' tall fence since it is much sturdier than the front garden fence and is superior to it as a trellis. I hate to concede defeat to the voles, and I'd never totally abandon a garden plot we worked so hard to create and to fence, but the voles have made gardening back there a real challenge. They might not bother anything at all for months, but once they start randomly eating roots at night, you walk out to that garden daily having no idea what sort of dead plants you'll find that day. I'm starting to think the best answer it so have a dedicated fruit garden. As our original fruit trees are beginning to age out, and the nearby shade trees aren't doing them any favors either, a new area for new fruit trees seems like a good idea, and the back garden could be it. This year, in the part of that garden with the softest soil, which is where the voles are most often found, I'm going to grow an entire forest of castor bean plants and daturas just for them. I bet they won't eat the roots of either of those. That's the area where putting in fruit trees in root cages in the future makes the most sense.