There is something called frass that you will see with squash vine borer damage. Google it and you'll know what to look for. You kind of have to follow the trail of frass to actually locate the beast.

Good luck! I just discovered it yesterday on my plants. Sigh.

- Anne

borers leave a sawdust-like mess at their entrance. the stems are hollow. i run a piece of wire up into the stem & pull the worm down to the hole & kill it. after killing the worm you can bury the damaged stem & it will root.

The brownish red eggs are squash bug eggs. Just destroy them as you did. Check the undersides of the leaves daily as new ones are always appearing.

The hole in you stems are most likely caused by birds pecking and eating the squash bugs.

SVB eggs are single small black dots on the stems, not the leaves, and you usually can't see the bore hole, just the frass.

Dave

Ok, great! Glad to know its not SVB's!

I will keep checking the leaves for the squash bug eggs daily.

Thanks!

I'm in North Carolina and usually loose the battle with SVB but I also have plenty of the more obvious squash bugs. I haven't noticed that they do much damage even when there are lots of them around. Re SVB: this year I am trying a row cover. I started with some manual pollination but right now I have been hoping the svb are not around in the middle of the day and have left the cover partly off then. We will see what happens.