beneficial?

One way to deal with garden pests (squash bugs and cucumber beetles are the devil) is to bring beneficial insects into your garden. So at the beginning of the season we bought some praying mantises and I was all happy about it. I thought it was such a natural way to control pests, no chemicals, circle of life blah, blah, blah.


But now that I've watched this video I'm afraid to go back to the butternut squash patch.


(don't worry, both bird and beast survived.)