Many caterpillars from various moths can do the same thing.

Sara - the solution to the rose slug damage is one I love, being a lazy gardener: do nothing, and the "good bugs" and birds will come eat the slugs for you. If they're doing more damage than you can tolerate, take a hose and spray it on top of and underneath the leaves to knock off the little green worms that are doing the damage (rose slugs). If you can brace yourself to handle this one of these two ways for a week or two, it'll resolve itself when the cavalry flies in.

Cynthia

Thanks for helping me! I lost two rose bushes last year, and I am a new rose gardner so just had no clue what this was. I was thinking it was disease, not insects! If I spray the roses with Bayer 3 in 1 (or something like that) will it do the trick? I also will follow your suggestions about getting the worms off by hand and with water.

Yes, rose slugs. I'm battleing them too right now. Hopefully they'll get fewer and fewer of them soon! In the mean time you can pick them off by hand or repeatedly spray your roses from the bottom up with a hard jet of water to knock them off. You have to do it several times over several days in order to get them all and any new hatches.

We don't normally recommend the 3 in 1 product because it's not as effective as the individual products for fertilizer, fungicide and insecticide are on their own. For some reason when they combine all these products together they don't make it as strong. If your going to spray you might as well use something that's effective.

If you have other flowering perennials and annuals in the garden amongst your roses, you'll likely attract bugs that eat the rose slugs -- in particular, yellow jackets hunt them down. My garden is two years old now, and the worst rose slug damage happened the first year, because I hadn't added perennials yet. Last year, I saw some damage early-on, but not quite as much as the year before, and then I saw very little at all after June. This year, the little I see is concentrated on roses which still don't have non-rose companions -- i.e., areas I'm still filling. You can spray insecticides to kill them, but you may inadvertently kill some of the critters that eat them as well, which can lock you in a cycle of HAVING to spray all the time because nothing else will be around to take care of them. It takes a bit of time for a food source to become obvious to critters that utilize it -- rose slugs didn't appear until I had roses, and bugs that eat rose slugs didn't appear until I had rose slugs.

Just something to think about.

:-)

~Christopher

1. Use an Insecticide. Chemical controls are also available, but should only be used when necessary, not routinely as a preventive measure. Horticultural oil, insecticidal soaps, neem oil, bifenthrin, carbaryl, malathion, permethrin, cyfluthrin, imidacloprid, and acephate can all be used to control sawflies. Apply pesticides only when larvae are actually present, before infestations reach critical levels. Always be careful to read the label directions fully before applying any pesticide, and follow directions completely. Not effective: Bacillus thuringiensis(Bt), a commonly used biological insecticide that offers control of many caterpillars, is NOT effective against sawfly larvae.

Copied from missouribotanicalgarden.org

Ps rose slug=sawfly

Horticulture oil, Neem oil, Safer soap are easy to use. Oil bases spray only can be used under 80 degrees(cooler weather). Safer soap you can use anytime. I'd go with Safer soap first. You can get them from Lowe's/ HD. :-)