This has been going on for at least a week now, and if you swipe to the last slide you can see it looks sort of like it’s covered in their saliva. There are multiple broken branches from this 5-5.5ft flower, but this one broke leaving just a little bit of the branch, whereas the others broke flush to the main stem. They have no interest in the ones that broke flush, just this guy. We have several other giant cosmos growing in our chaos yarden, and other red wasps seem to hang out near or on them exclusively, but this one weird conglomeration of them is distinct from the other behavior I’ve seen. Did some googling and didn’t find anything, but would love to find out
by UHElle
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Easy phloem access maybe? Can’t really tell how fresh the wound is. On a side note, it looks like this plant has a nasty fungal infection, like telial horns in a rust fungus’s life cycle.