I spotted several babies on my little new squash leaves. I read they are hard to kill when they are big. I found eggs on a nearby wisteria plant. I'm all new to these darn things. Learning fast! Thinking of not planting anything in the Cucurbit family next year. Hard to do with the price of a single cuke being 72 cents!

I spotted one earlier in the year, trying to get at the young cukes I had under netting - which the beetles penetrated. I didn't have much squash out then.

I've been seeing some minor sign of damage on the Butternut for a month now, but spotting the actual bugs has been another matter. They're big, but they're the exact color of dirt.

In case I have posted this before for anyone.....pardon me.

I wait until the wrap up of the season and that is when the bugs begin to converge on any remaining fruits or leaves. Then I stomp them out. The more perfectly you get them all [and perhaps your near neighbor's] will help determine next year's crop of these buggers. I have had near zero of these bugs the last three years.

Last year, I only found a couple end of the season bugs and thought I'd got them all. Apparently not.

What I'm finding right now are a few clutches of newly-laid eggs and green nymphs that I want to eradicate before they grow up and lie in wait for me next year. I suspect there's an egg-laying adult or so that I haven't been able to find, but I just can't check every leaf every day on every squash for new eggs. So I'm wondering what kind of leaves are the most likely target.

From what I can tell.. all of them. I've seen them on older leaves, I've seen them on newer leaves. And a couple of times I've seen the eggs on my tomato plants!!!!! :(

One way to draw the adults out is to water the base of the plant -- they come running out, and there I am...

hcoon - good trick. They don't seem to like getting wet.

I've never seen one on an already-damaged leaf, but then I never used to get this pest.

I'm beginning to think that the slash-and-burn people who moved on to a fresh site every few years had the right idea. Pests accumulate.

*sigh* Squash bugs have had a lot of fun in my garden this year. They started attacking the pumpkins, then the butternut and now have decided my crookneck and cucumbers are delicious. By the time I figured out what was causing the wilting/dying leaves, I was overrun.

So, from my experience, they like to hide under anything close to the ground. They take harbor under my pumpkins, under dead leaves that are on the dirt (that they killed, ugh!,) under.... anything. If you spray the plants with water, you should see them moving to higher ground..... but more than likely, they are hiding under whatever area has the most cover.

Here is my question............. : What is the point in eradicating them/fighting them at the end of the season? I know the theory is that I will have less next year... but.... this is my first time with a garden on this lot of land (the house is a new build.) There aren't any other gardens within acres of this spot. These bugs came from somewhere.......! If I kill everything, won't they still find me..... much like they did this year?

They overwinter under boards, leaves, etc. We can have 3 infestations here in one summer. Kill as many as you can! You are inviting them to a buffet of gourmet food. They won't go anywhere else!

The mature bugs overwinter and emerge again in late spring. They're likely going to go back to the nearest garden, which is probably the one they came from.

I am becoming very familiar with squash bugs and have studied their habits and patterns. I have to if I want any summer or winter squash and I certainly do. I rotate leaf inspection between 3 plots in different areas. They seem to go for summer squash first. Check the undersides of leaves and on smooth shiny leaves check the top side too. A lot of eggs will be right at the leaf base and in between veins. I always miss some but with an every three day inspection I can catch the nursery leaf and tear it off into a bucket of water. All adults and nymphs go in the bucket. The watering trick works too. I get great satisfaction if I can destroy a mating pair.These and bean beetles are my worst pests so I try to research each pest when I can as I prefer a no chemical approach if I can.

They Say that when it comes to squash bugs, the manual approach is actually more effective than the chemical.

Visiting another gardener over the holiday, I was happy that I managed to spot and nail 3 of the nasty buggers. I think I'm getting the eye for them.

The cucumber beetles are still my main problem, though.

The adults are hard to kill with chemicals, if you must use chemicals. The babies or nymphs are the stage to kill them with a chemical. I read to rotate your crops helps. I not sure how that would work well with this bug, because they fly. I just had a lady tell me she had hundreds of them descend upon her garden in a day. Kill as many as you can! I read that they like to go underneath a cabbage leaf at night. Haven't tried that one yet.

I've never seen one flying. They seem to crawl a lot, which makes them easy to spot and splat. I've found a couple hiding underneath the large fruits. But no eggs or nymphs for a couple of weeks, although I keep checking for them.

Can you be more specific about what you do at the end of the season? I am seeing stink bugs for the first time, but I have some 30 square yards of trellis, covered with squash. You dust the whole thing with Sevin? Or you torch the trellis?
Last Fall I made a concerted effort to spray BT until the end, and this year the cabbage moth is vastly reduced, so I am interested in this kind of prevention.

I had very few squash bugs earlier in the summer so I was just scraping off the eggs and smashing them as well as killing any adults I could catch.
This weekend I found quite a few eggs clusters on my giant pumpkin vines. I had read that a mixture of dish soap, oil and water could be sprayed on the eggs to kill them so I made up a batch and sprayed and sprayed.
Then tonight I did a bit more reading and didnt find a thing about using this mixture for squash bugs.
Have any of you heard of this treatment or was it a waste of time ??
I hope to find out soon so I can get busy scrapping eggs if need be.
Thanks for your input :)

In my experience w/ the villians that solution did nothing, also adding tobacco tea did nothing except make them move so you could squish them easier. Eggs need to be removed and squished, or vaccumed w/ a dust buster ( just scrape w/ your finger as you suck w/ the vaccume) and when you empty the dust buster make sure it is leaving the poperty or burned or otherwise destroyed, if left in tact even off the plant the will hatch. I have spent my summer squishing and looking under leaves. The nymph like to congregate in the center plant stalk "jungle" or under the lower lying leaves (mostly) but can be anywhere. They do need to be killed b/c they will overwinter and be back w/ a vengence, and while there preference is squash, I have seen them on many other garden plants, leading me to believe if they do not have squash they may infest other plants (but don't know that for sure, just suspect)

Thank you for the advice Kassaundra. I'll head out tommorrow and start the process. Wish I'd known and not wasted the time and energy with the spraying...ah well. At least I now know and can hopefully kill most of them before they hatch. (I did spray bunches of nymphs...they are probably out there laughing at me right now!)
:)

well, I went out today to scrape off eggs (I dont have a dust buster) and was disappointed to see that a number of them had already hatched. Scraped until my back hurt and finally took a trip to Lowes and got seven spray. Will try that route tomorrow.
Thanks again for your advice :)

Dusting the bases of the plants with DE seems to help. I think it kills the nymphs but not adults.

If you have ridged squashes or pumpkins on the ground, the black widows may help control the population. They love the little indentations under big fruits. They're not enough to stop a squash bug infestation, though. Incidentally, watch out for widows when picking ridged squashes or melons.

I rotate my plants each year in my garden. I have never had a problem before this year. This year my cucumbers were sparse. The plants hardly grew. The summer squash hardly grew maybe a foot and then withered and died. Now my butternut squash have grey bugs on them - which I pick off a couple of times a day and very few dark beetles/bugs. I like these 3 plants and would like to grow them next year but I'm not sure what prevention to do??????

I've always put my squash into plastic bags to deter the furry varmints and never had any problems with this. Today, however, I noticed one of the 2nd-crop green stripies looking like it was going to abort. But what I found at a closer look were blue nymphs on the fruit inside the bag, along with some striped beetles. Checking all the others, I found a few more blues.

I may have to rethink this.

I think I may have seen one or two adults art the beginning of the season, but none since...and this is from a former squash bug fighter.

Never had them before. Would be happy never to have them again.

Never had them before either. It's got to be due to a warmer climate.

well, friday I sprayed for squash bugs and today I found new eggs on the giant pumpkin vine. Also they seemed to have spread to the silver edge squash (which I did spray friday as well) on the opposite side of the yard...yikes.
Wondering if I should spray again so soon.

The adults can fly.

This year I was partially successful in my never ending battle with squash bugs. I started with Surround Kaolin spray which is a repellant and does not kill the bugs but the bugs hate the stuff. I grow on trellis so I can totally cover top and bottom of all leaves and all around stem. My next option was egg hunting - whenever I found the tell-tale group of those reddish brown eggs on the under side of leaves - I removed the entire leaf and put it in zip bag in the trash. I also used a long neck grill lighter to burn eggs on leaves - it got dry here so I stopped this to prevent fire.

Then I did research on what some Aggie schools were doing. The Ag schools were testing Bifenthrin - a synthetic Pyrethroid. I got the brand name ((Ortho Bug-B-Gone)) and used 50% of what they recommend rotated with actual Pyrethrin every 7 days. I got more squash this year and actually kept my cucumber plants alive and producing until mid-August. The Surround Kaolin allowed the plants to get large and strong before the attack of squash bugs and cucumber beetles could begin.

I know most folks do not like to spray but I was sick and tired of bugs destroying my garden. We always spray just before dark when there are no bees around and we had more bees this summer than we have seen since DH stopped keeping bees.

Just my 2 cents,
DL

I live in 8b Georgia. The heat doesn't deter them! We have at least two cycles of them because we have a long season. I read about putting boards down for them to lay under at night and then scrape them off and kill them during the day. I also read that they are hard to kill in the adult stage. They have several insteps when they are nymphs. They are even red in step 1 instep. Never thought I'd be so interested in bugs. I've done alot of Googling this year.

I've been reading the other thread about making a stink bug trap from plastic drink bottles and an LED light. Squash bugs are related, I think I'll try it.

I saw the trap too, the man made it for in his house, gave me the heeby jeebies just thinking about them in the house!!!!! they are bad enough in the garden. I have been zealous in my squishing efforts this entire growing season, and I still have live, healthy squash plants, and now have very few squash bugs on them, however I am about to lose all my cukes to the spotted cuke beetles.

Whoever it was that thought squash bugs are repelled by heat, we have had 2 months of 100-110 degree summer and were overrun w/ the squash bugs.

Another thing I've thought of - spiders prey on bugs. I get these really HUGE wolf spiders in my potato mulch. I'm thinking to encourage them to shift their operations over to the squash.

Regarding a solution of water and Dawn dish soap- this was the only way I conquered squash bugs. They completely decimated my garden last year while we were away on a 3 week trip. This year I still have healthy squash plants.

This year I removed the eggs when I saw them and sprayed hatched/nymphs/adults with wild abandon. The soapy water coats their bodies and they can't breathe. They die within seconds of a good saturation.

I make it a game of "the great hunter" and give the honor to my 11 year old. Incidentally, he pulled a grotesquely huge zucchini from the garden today. Oops. Guess that one was hiding.

I don't use the spray on the eggs. I just remove them entirely.

Good luck!

Thanks Erin for your report of success. I knew I'd read somewhere that it worked.
I'm sure that the fact that I use chopped leaves as mulch contributes to the bugs survival. It was just too hot and dry this summer to make me remove it. I spray the mulch down and then spray the bugs as they try to run from the water.
The fight goes on....

My nephew took these pictures a couple days ago...

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:104829}}

I squished them right after he took the pic

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:104830}}

no longer alive...

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:104831}}

Nice photos!

Your 2nd-instar blue nymphs seem to be still clustering together. It's more convenient to get them that way. Is anyone aware at what stage they take off as individuals?

Just a little bit of humor

Here is a link that might be useful: SquashBug Hunt'n

Update on the squash bug hunt:

When I started this thread about a month ago I was finding a few egglaying adults, a number of egg clusters, and a few newly-hatched clutches of green nymphs.

I must have hit the peak of egglaying. The last few weeks, all I've spotted have been 2nd instar blue nymphs. More recently, it's been the larger 3rd instar blues - these are more often alone rather than in groups, and I'm finding them more often on the fruits than the leaves.

I wonder if this is a seasonal thing, if the adults have died off after egglaying. The nymphs can't overwinter here, a hard freeze will kill them if they haven't reached adulthood. Unfortunately no freeze in the foreseeable forecast.

If what I'm seeing is all one generation, next two instars will be larger but harder to spot, being dirt-colored.

I had some squash in containers this year and had a bad infestation when the leaves got on the ground. Yep they loved to hide under them.
I planted some late squash again in containers but used tomato cages to keep the leaves off the ground.
I have seen very few crawl up the base of the plant when I water but nothing like when the leaves were on the ground.

I've seen them crawling up in the trellis where squash are growing. But those were adults, that can fly.

This is my first year growing pumpkins. Grew squash last year. I had a very large infestation of the darned things this year and did hours of research. I have a bee hive a few yards from my 1/4 acre patch so I will not use any insecticides etc. Although as with any method, this is time consuming but very effective in killing both the nymphs AND adults. Get yourself some "Castile" soap. Kirk's makes it and Dr. Bronner's & probably others. It is an old fashioned hand (bar) soap. I found Kirk's @ my local grocery store. Usually not found in Wal-marts etc. Shave or grate about 1/3rd of the bar into 32 oz. of hot/very warm water and let it dissolve. Put it in a spray bottle, set it half way between stream and spray (this gives it just a bit of foam with the spray) and spray those buggers. The little ones die on contact and the adults may move a few inches to a foot before they keel over. This soap works because the "castile" means it was made with natural (olive, coconut, vegetable etc.) oil. It causes them to suffocate. This has worked awesome for me. I go out in the evening when the bees are done and avoid spraying the flowers. Have to pick up and look under the leaves and you can get several at once if they are clustered. I seem to find them most often under the leaves that are already dying around the edges. As for the eggs, I got tired of cutting and bagging so I just use a grill lighter and burn them til they are obviously useless.

If you have a hard time finding the soap you can get it on line but check the grocery store first. Kirk's Castille Soap comes in a white paper wrapper with blue and red printing and I buy mine for $1.99 for a 3 pack.