Mossy Rose Gall Wasps
Hi, I’m back! Sorry for the long delay between posts[1]. Anyway, back in November 2024, I found some of these galls on some wild rosebushes down the road.
After taking those pictures, I put the galls in the refrigerator to overwinter, and then pulled them out in April and kept them in a jar to see what would come out. And, on May 22, 2025, this is what came out:
There were lots of them, all tiny little things a bit smaller than fruit flies (about 2-3 mm long). They had huge abdomens for their size, and didn’t fly super well.
Some of them held their wings a bit flared out to the sides, while others held them tight together and close to the body.
(I thought that the way that they held the wings might be a sexual characteristic, but according to Wikipedia this species only has about 1% males and mostly reproduces parthenogenetically, so I probably didn’t actually see any males).
So, anyway, as I figured from the weird gall they came out of, these are Diplolepis_rosae. They don’t actually do any serious harm to the rosebushes, and actually the mossy galls are kind of interesting visually, so after I finished taking pictures I let them all go. There were about 50 or so, I think, I didn’t count them.
[1] So, back in March, my home computer blew its power supply. Since I do almost all of my work-critical computer work in the office, and most online things that I do for amusement can be done on my phone, the main thing I really use the home machine for is this blog (which, since it is personal and has nothing to do with my job, I didn’t want to be writing it at work). So, since it wasn’t really crucial to me to have a home computer, I kind of dithered about what to do about it. Particularly since the cost of a new power supply was probably comparable to the value of a 5-year-old computer. So I kept going back and forth on whether I should fix the old computer, or just get a new one. Last week, I finally decided to bite the bullet and get a new one. Which is looking like the right choice, the old one was a “consumer” model which came preloaded with all sorts of social media and entertainment garbage, was constantly trying to second-guess what I wanted to do, and never really worked right. Meanwhile, this new one is a “business” model which is very uncluttered and to the point, and so far seems to do exactly what I tell it to do, no more and no less.
And another bit of good news: now that you’ve upgraded your computer, my iPad no longer flags your site as Not Secure”.