As growers switch to transgenic crops and selective insecticides that are less toxic to natural enemies, natural enemies can become more important in agricultural pest management. Current decision-making guides are generally based on pest abundance and do not address pest and natural enemy toxicity differences among insecticides or the impact of natural enemies on pest survival. A refined approach to making pest management decisions is to include the impact of natural enemies and insecticides, thereby better integrating biological and chemical control. The result of this integration is a dynamic threshold that varies for each product and the level of biological control expected. To demonstrate the significance of conserved biological control in commercial production, a decision-making guide was developed that evaluates control options for European corn borer in sweet corn. Management options include a broad-spectrum insecticide, a selective insecticide, a parasitoid, and a transgenic variety. Treatment cost is the primary factor separating the threshold for each treatment within a common scenario. However, when the impact of a treatment on natural enemies is projected over a 3-wk control period, the impact of the treatment on predators becomes the key factor in determining the threshold, so the lowest thresholds are for broad-spectrum treatments, while selective products can have thresholds more than six times higher by the third wk. This decision guide can serve as a framework to help focus future integrated pest management research and to aid in the selection of pest management tools.