Jewel wasps

Last summer while hiking near Bald Hill we found a rose bush covered in strange mossy growths.  I didn’t take a picture, but they looked like this:

Rose gall (photo from Wanderin' Weeta blog)

After some research, we learned that they were “mossy rose galls”, inhabited by the larvae of the Diplolepis rosae wasp:

Rose gall wasp, credit to hedgerowmobile.com

John put the galls in a jar, and we forgot about them for four months.  When John opened the jar today, imagine our surprise to find these beautiful creatures:

Female (top) and two males, taken with 20x magnification through John's dissecting scope.

 

Female close-up.

 

These are Jewel Wasps, Torymus bedeguaris, which parasitize the gall wasp larvae – meta-parasites!  No gall wasps hatched out, either because they were all parasitized or (more likely) because they were more sensitive to dessication as the galls dried out.

 

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