Rose bedeguar gall wasp
The rose bedeguar gall wasp is a tiny black and red wasp, only 3 or 4 millimetres long. It is famous for what it makes: a fluffy ball on wild roses that looks like a tuft of red moss. Its babies grow up safe inside that ball.
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Fun facts
The fluffy ball is called a robin's pincushion and can grow up to 10 centimetres wide.
The hairy threads on the ball change colour from green to pink, then crimson, then reddish brown.
The mother can lay up to 60 eggs in one rose bud.
Almost all of these wasps are girls. Boys are very, very rare.
The babies spend the whole winter inside the ball and fly out as grown-up wasps in May.
Most asked questions about Rose bedeguar gall wasp
?What is a robin's pincushion?
It is a fluffy, mossy ball on a wild rose. The tiny gall wasp makes the rose grow it, and the wasp babies live inside.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Diplolepis rosae
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Cynipidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Cynipidae
- Lives on
- Europe
Where the facts come from
- Diplolepis rosae (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Arnstein Staverløkk, Norsk institutt for naturforskning. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.
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