I battle them every year an old farmer came over one day she sliced open a stem picked out the grub and buried the open stem it took root and the plant was ok now i have yet to do it myself im not shure where in the vine the little thing is. they have killed many of my plants ive heard that row covers work but you have to hand pollinate or remove when flowers open ive not used row covers yet in my expireance. i tried paracitic nematodes this year but i still got dead pumkins in the garden, maybe i applied em wrong or sumthin I am new to gardening so anything is possible

These gals seem to be a continuing problem every year and the usual first thing you hear is be sure to clean up your garden in the fall to eliminate hiding places for the adults, however that also eliminates the potential wintering over places of the predators of the Squash Bugs.
A general very early method of control is floating row covers to keep the early adults off the newly emerging plants, but these need to be removed at blossoms time unless you wish to hand pollinate a lot. Planting an icycle radish next to each squash plant has been reported to help deter the buggers and I have seen some reports that reflective material on the ground below the plants seems to keep them off too.
Other controls, for the larva after they have hatched, would be Bacillus thurigiensis - Kurstaki, Neem Oil sprays, and pyrethrine based sprays and dusts.

Hey, Kimm, long time no see! Have you completely given up on BHG like I have?

Radishes, eh? I heard that nasturtiums planted with the squash will deter the bugs but so far it hasn't been effective. Could be that the nasturtiums are still so much smaller then the zucchini and haven't begun to flower since I planted the seeds at the same time.

Do you think scraping the eggs off helps at all?

I've not abandoned BHG altogether its just that there are so few gardening questions there any more.
Nasturtiums have been very successfully used as a trap crop many times, for aphids. They are not good traps for many other insects I often see listed however.
Scraping egg cases off plant leaves is a good idea, as long as you are sure those egg cases are the insect pest and not a beneficial, and look closely to see if these egg cases have not be parasitized.

It was said:
"Other controls, for the larva after they have hatched, would be Bacillus thuringiensis - Kurstaki"

Sorry, but that product works against caterpillars, but only those which are half-grown or younger.

Many people refer to both pests of squash as squash bugs but I should have been more specific that the BTK is an effective control of the Squash Vine Borer, not the Squash Bug.

kimmsr,

Thanks for the clarification.

Contrary to popular belief, Bt does very little against SVB.

i,m a garlic farmer, but grow other things too i juice a lot of garlic try to get about 6 oz of pure garlic juice then mix soap, water and cayanne pepper to make about a quart they dont like it at all kills em dead cant seem to find a sprayer that will spray the cayanne particles though so i pour it on them

I had a real invasion of those squash bugs last summer about this time. I decided to try something rather than buying batches of chemicals, or mixing up different concoctions. The season was pretty much a loss anyway, so I let them kill off most of the plants, as they were doing anyway. Then I removed each dead plant and piled them together. The bugs just moved to the next one, until there was one left. I have one of those torch burners where you screw the propane bottle to it. I burned the heck out of that plant and the whole top layer within about five feet in that row. I then burned each spot where the other plants were, plus the pile of dead plants. So far this year, all squash and zucchini have been growing strong without any signs of damage. I even tried a few egg plant, which in previous years never got close to making any flowers before being chewed up. They are almost ready to bloom. I also used row covers until the plants were well developed. So maybe they did the trick, or the burning helped. The next few weeks will tell how effective my efforts were, but it looks much better so far.

palmclubber, you need to steep that mixture for ar least 24 hours and then strain it to take out any big clumps of stuff before spraying. Many variations of that exist with as many variable results so we don't often recommend people bother with mixing these "recipes" anymore.

I found some organic squash bug killer on Google called mr. malcolm's squash bug eliminator that kills eggs and adults. I've tried everything else in the past but this stuff works. I tried neem oil but it left a taste after using it for a while. Little devils are persistent. There are probably pesticides out there but I'm afraid to eat the veggies.

Thanks, palmclubber! We tried your "recipe" this evening; actually made it a family affair. First, we sprayed your mixture, [my husband built a power sprayer with a garden hose attached, so we have no problems with clumping] which killed most of the smaller squash bugs within minutes, then we waded through the pumpkin patch and gathered the adult bugs, which came out in droves after being sprayed and were really easy to pick up, and drowned them in buckets of the same mixture. Maybe they would have died as well, I don't know, but since it was so easy, we went ahead and got all that we saw. I picked off some of the eggs, but I'm sure I missed a lot of them. I hope they die as well! At any rate, this has been more effective than anything else we tried, so we will do it again in a couple days. I am very happy, because I don't like chemicals, but I love squash and pumpkins, and it looks more hopeful for ours now! Thanks!

just for kicks i'd like to give that a shot. do you have the ratios of what you used?

I have also read that some people use car or shop vacs to vacuum them up, and then they dump the contents of the vac into soapy water to kill them. Neem oil mixed with a little soap as a surfactant and diluted with half water and half rubbing alcohol is also supposed to be effective, but you have to keep at it. The neem oil interrupts the developmental cycle in the growing bugs and the alcohol supposedly acts more directly to weaken or kill them on contact.

Those needing to control squash pests may want to read this compilation of the latest information.

Here is a link that might be useful: Squash pest control

I had an infestation of these myself this year on my pumpkin and summer squash and they moved to my butter nut squash. As funny or weird as this sounds it worked. I loaded up my generator in my truck and used a shop vacuum to suck the beetles up and then sprayed all my squash and cucumber with a garlic, onion, cayenne pepper and soap mixture. This seems to have done the trick. The shop vac eliminated about 90% of them and the spray keeps them from coming back. I also checked on the underside of the leaves and either removed part of the leaf or all of it to get rid of the eggs.