or any other bug you don't want in your garden.

I've been trying to win the war with cucumber beetles this summer and am in the second round. Adults have emerged again and I am seeing them either solo or mating inside the flower blossoms. I've found that as soon as I get close to them they drop down into the ground. Also, I don't really like squishing them with my fingers, so I've found a solution that catches them before they can run away and so that I don't have to squish them:

Take a thin straw, popscicle stick or anything long and thin and dip the end in some Tanglefoot spread, which you can get at a gardening center. Essentially, we're making a sticky trap on a stick. Then carefully inspect your plants and and you should have no problem getting the end of the straw right on the cucumber beetle. And you don't have to be dead on, because you just roll the end of the straw around the flower blossom and you'll get it, as it tries to crawl out and down.

I also made permanent traps using clove oil, yellow paint and tanglefoot inside a plastic cup, that caught hundreds of baby beetles (little yellow specks) at the beginning of the season, but they didn't catch any adults.

Let me know if you want pics or if you have any questions.

Why is it that we are squeamish about squishing bugs with our bare hands?

I've got a grasshopper problem, but it's not that hard to catch them and squish them early in the morning when it's cool and they are moving slowly, except that doing so gives me the heebie jeebies and with gloves I lack the dexterity to grab 'em.

Fortunately my kids have no qualms about catching grasshoppers or any other kind of bug. They just dive in there and grab 'em. Then they bring them in and want to put them in jars. Each of the kids has about 10 jelly jars full of grasshoppers. I sort of track the oldest jar-full and when the contents expires I bury the dead bugs in the compost, wash the jar, and set it out for the next day's bug catching.

I figure that I can get away with this for about one more year before the oldest one gets better at counting and starts to notice that he doesn't have 90 jars of bugs at the end of the summer.

What is tanglefoot?

Tanglefoot is a sticky compound used to make insect traps. It's a white and green tub, about the size of a small margarine container. You spread it on with a knife. I bought it at my local garden centre. I live in Ontario.

Maybe you can sell them as bait for trout fishing. One of my favorite stories is "The Grasshopper Trap" by Patrick McManus which humorously deals with a bait collecting scheme gone awry.