Aphids.

Yep. They're absolutely delicious sprinkled on a salad, or as dessert dipped in chocolate.

Just keep doing what you're doing. Actually, with the right technique for knocking them down, you might not even need the soap and water. Try cupping the infected stems in one hand and spraying water with the other. In much of the midwest, certainly in my garden, aphids are a very temporary problem, maybe lasting a week or so, two or three times a season. Natural predators may take control and maturing rose flower stems may contain natural repellents such as catechin.

The reason just hitting them with a blast of water works (or so I've heard) is that once they get washed to the ground they cannot climb back up on the roses. They're finished once you wash them off.

Also, you probably already know this, but aphids are raised and milked by ants much the way we raise and milk cows, so controlling ants will help control aphids.

Susan

Aphids are disgusting little creatures. By the start of Autumn all my roses are infested with aphids. They copy mites and hide under the leaves, leaving the front/ top leaves sticky.

I read that when your leaves get shiny and sticky it means that Aphids did a 'poop'? LOL.

Aphids are so easily controlled during spring/summer. I use my fingers to squash them. But how smart of them to hide under the leaves by autumn and bred like a monster.

I personally like the chocolate idea. I think that's what the lady bugs think right before they devour one!

Blasting them with water works as well as it does because aphids don't have lungs, but areoles, holes down the sides of their bodies like portholes on old Buicks. They require air to blow through them to breathe. Hitting them with any liquid clogs the holes and suffocates them.

It will seem not to be working because each aphid can give birth to hundreds of LIVE, PREGNANT females every seven to ten days. Their reproductive cycle is quite fascinating. You'll drown hundreds, but the few hundred which survive replicate themselves by the hundreds each week, so it appears what you're doing isn't working. You have to keep at it.

Predatory insects love them, but remember, WE are the only 'predator' in Nature which eliminates its food source. The good bugs leave 'starter' colonies so their food reproduces itself and they don't starve. If you have to have full annihilation, insecticides are the only answer. If you can put up with SOME bugs, leave them to the Lady Bugs, etc.

Usually, aphids only hang around during the 'greenhouse' condition times...warmish, moist, 'close' weather. Once it gets too dry, too hot or too cold, they leave, moving to more suitable weather. Here in SoCal, they go higher up the mountains where it isn't as severe or down to the beach, the incubator for the whole state.

The aphids we usually deal with as pests usually need lush, succulent growth to be able to feed. Once the stems start stiffening up they can't insert their needle mouths into the stems to suck out the sap anymore. That's why you see aphids on roses right now and that's why you don't see them so much later on in the summer. By then they've mostly moved on to other plants.

Everything I never wanted to know about aphids, Kim, lol!

There is something altogether satisfying about squishing the little buggers between your fingers!

For the squeamish, a few drops of dish soap in a spray bottle filled with water and spritzed on the new growth will take them out too. Repeat every other day until they're gone.

I squish them with my fingers when I see them. So satisfying.

Rosefolly

Understood, but when you understand HOW and WHY they are where they are, when they're there, you know not to worry and how to handle them efficiently and without horrible poisons. Years of dealing with gardening customers have shown me the homeowners as well as those who SHOULD have known better using some pretty awful stuff to control them. All it takes is water, fingers, lady bugs and time and they're not a problem anymore. Kim

Well there are more than enough lady bugs and definitely enough water....we just got another 3.2 inches of rain last night. The soapy water I sprayed on there did get them off for a while. There are a lot of ants around the house, so maybe I can quell the aphids a bit by getting rid of the ants to an extent.

Oh, I agree, Kim, knowledge is power! I'm just not into bug's sex lives, lol!

Jeff, you have to reapply the soap spritz a few times because, like Kim said, there are new eggs hatching. But usually after 3 times I find they don't come back.

Good luck with the ants. Some people say cockroaches will inherit the earth. Personally I think it will be the ants! They can be helpful though. Did you know they help your peonies open?

seil, that's the insidious part about it, there AREN'T new eggs hatching. Eggs hatch in spring producing male and female aphids. They mate once, the males die out until fall when more are produced. Until then, every seven to ten days, hundreds to thousands of LIVE, PREGNANT females are born! As light levels reduce, males are born, fetilized eggs laid and come spring, that dance occurs all over again. Kim

Yegads! Talk about baby factories!

OK, now I have a question for you. If the hard spray of water knocks them to the ground and they can't climb back up, how did they get up there in the first place?

They fly at one stage of their lives. Once one is there, it begins pumping out babies which colonize the plant. That's how they migrate from hotter, drier areas to more "greenhouse" type weather elsewhere.

Yegads! Talk about baby factories!

Correct.

At this time of year (in most of the USA) adult female aphids are rapidly giving birth to live immature female aphids who are already pregnant.....

Thanks guys! Now I get it!

I have to say, many times after blasting the aphids off with a spray of water, I've looked an hour later and seen an army of them marching back up the canes. Of course, many will not make it back. Still, it is more effective (and less wasteful of water) to spritz them with 1 tsp. dish soap/quart of water.

Whether you squish, blast, or spritz, all you need to do is keep them from continuously encrusting shoots for more than a few days at a time. Actually, even if you let them do that, the harm is not great. And normally, aphids will subside around the time of the first flush. I just ignored them this year--the roses bloomed just fine, and now the aphids are gone.

This thread is full of information and conflicting information, and obviously some of the mis-information has been mine. I had always believed (had been told) that the aphids couldn't get back up once they were washed off. The previous post makes it clear that I was wrong about that. I am not particularly concerned about aphids (I do get them, but not to the extent that they are more than a minor nuisance that I can mostly rub off between my fingers when I am doing other stuff amongst them.) BUT, I do find myself curious about their wheres, whys and hows.

They fly to the plant the first time? Ants herd them? They drown when the water hits 'em? I'm getting dizzy from all of the ideas and I'm not quite sure what to take as fact and what is fanciful thinking.

And, absolutely this is NOT a slur on anyone here or on GW or anything like that. I probably should have shut up before I started, but.....I'm bumfuzzled and I'm going to shut up NOW.

Susan

Yes, the first aphids of spring fly to the plant.

Yes, some species of ants herd aphids, but that may not be a factor in a particular garden.

Whether a spray from the hose can drown them, I don't know, could be.

About aphids returning after the fire-hose treatment, people should look for themselves.

{{gwi:260155}} The winged aphids of the spring and summer appear when the host plant is becoming less accommodating to aphid feeding requirements (usually because the stems of the host plant are hardening up, and thus no longer lush and easily penetrated by aphid mouths). They spend the winter as eggs laid on the stems of various woody plants (with different species having different host preferences).

Alatae = "winged aphids"

Apterae = "wingless aphids"

There are a number of plant-feeding insect species (generally located in two suborders of the insect order "Hemiptera") who feed by sucking the sap out of their host plants (not unlike the way a flea or a louse feeds on the blood of its mammal host animal). Sometimes these sap-sucking insects also exude from their own bodies a sugary liquid known as "honeydew".

A variety of ant species LOVE to eat honeydew and when a colony of one of those ant species encounters a honeydew-secreting insect feeding on the sap of a plant they'll eat the honeydew, and sometimes also take measures to make sure the honeydew-secreting insect isn't eaten by a predator. Sometimes they'll even go so far as to move the honeydew-secreting insects around to new spots on the host plant so that they have new places from which to feed on the host (& thus continue to secrete honeydew for the ants to eat).

(If you're noticing a similarity to what we do with pasture animals like cattle, goats, & sheep, you aren't the first to notice that! :) )