Here is a method to control cucumber beetles that anney, from this forum, published in a prior posting. I am copying and pasting rather than have you read a very long thread. At the bottom is info and a link about SVBs: Posted by anney Georgia 8 (My Page) on Wed, Jun 24, 09 at 5:45 For those who might be interested, the rationale for this insecticide is to combine two ingredients, a cucumber beetle lure and a cucumber beetle poison. The lure must not attract any other insects to the poison. The quickest insecticide using these principles to dispatch cuke beetles is to combine clove oil and dental disclosing tablets (made with red dye #28 -- no other red dye works) with water and set it around your plants. Dissolve one tablet containing the red dye in a half-cup of water. Then mix 3 tablespoons of the dye mixture and one teaspoon of the clove oil and put it in a shallow non-plastic container like a jar lid or even a small metal catfood can so the cucumber beetles can feed on it. Set it in your garden or hang it about 24" high on your trellises. (Clove oil melts plastic so don't use plastic cups.) Save the rest of the dye mixture in the refrigerator and your clove oil separately. Replenish after rain or when it evaporates. Female cucumber beetles are attracted by the volatiles in the clove oil and will flock to eat it -- but no other insects are attracted to it. The red dye that they ingest along with the clove oil is phototoxic, meaning that it causes a reaction when the insect is in sunlight, killing them in as little as five minutes. You can replace the red dye #28 with Sevin if you don't have ready access to the red dye and don't mind going chemical. The Sevin does not go in your garden or on your plants, so you aren't contaminating your garden with it. It stays in its container, and it must eventually be discarded, so that's something to think about. You can also use cucumber "boats" as your container. Just slice a cucumber the long way, scoop out some of the seeds, and soak them in the clove oil and dye mixture for several hours so they absorb them. Then set them around your garden. (They'll disintegrate in place with no harm done to anything.) Cucumber beetles will decrease in number as the females die. Using this insecticide, I don't see any but one or two stray cuke beetles after a few days. ************************* SVBs As far as SVBs, if you are sure you have them (have you seen an entry hole and frass in the stem?) there are lots of postings here on how to attempt to treat it using Bt injected into the stem after retrieving the SVB larvae from within the stem. Here is a link someone published previously by a forum member which explains how (see "Management"). And there are lots of postings about this if you search 'SVB' here at the bottom of the page. Here is a link that might be useful: SVB info

"I've never heard of anyone using layering for this method but you must have been working in a pretty big scale to get that much heat from the chips." I was somewhat limited by the equipment I was using. Last summer I rented a Dingo to move mulch and make more mounds. While they are handy to move mulch, they are pretty slow digging, so I really didn't use near enough top soil (because it was slow to dig). However, I had built mounds the same way (layered mulch mounds) the summer before and gotten by with it with no problems. I constructed them by starting with a big mound of mulch (wood chips) on the bottom and then a couple alternating layers of soil and mulch after that. My thought was the layers of mulch would be thin enough they wouldn't compost, but I got the mulch too thick. Before I started using mulch mounds, I made mounds with just plain dirt and have never had any problems with 100% dirt. I agree I don't think mulch on the bottom with a generous amount of topsoil on top would have caused problems, as long as the roots were insulated from the mulch.

Exciting news indigo! I can only speak from my own experience and say that I have had Chickadees nest in a BB box here, and the Blues did not try to swipe the box. Then again, I had 2 other options in the yard for the Blues. Do you have another BB box up? I'd put one up if you don't. I haven't heard of using a Sparrow Spooker on a box of Dees. Hope that someone here knows. I don't put one on mine. It's cool that you will be able to monitor the Chickadee nest. Their little eggs are the size of Jelly Belly jelly beans. Sometimes, the moms will sit tight on the nest when you open the box, even after you thump on the box before opening it. :o)

Sorry to hear it's back, but glad to know they only found one tumor; I hope they're able to test it. This is a really dumb question, but why do they need to test it? Is it possible that it's only a benign tumor? As for not scheduling the biopsy until a few days after the colonoscopy, be glad because you will want to EAT!! Much good luck to and many prayers for you, Kat.