I was happy to not have to go into 4x4 to get home yesterday. The road and drive is melting. I have a 4x4 plow truck chained up on all four wheels and a Kubota tractor to keep it clear. April 10th, I didn’t need four wheel drive to get home in my Pathfinder!
Spring is HERE!
I’d much rather deal with that than freaking scorpions in the house. Umm no. Nope, uh, uh. No way.
It sounds like an 1980s metal concert from hell.
Ever notice a correlation between the onset of scorpion/fire ant/other hellacious southern pest season and a decline in the number of mocking posts from southerners about northern cold?
I wonder how Houston and other parts of Texas are coping with the invasion of crazy ants.*
*fire ants are bad enough, but I can’t imagine something even worse.
There are no scorpions where I live but I’m really not a fan of wasps. Nasty little bastards (actually, I’ve been told that some of the ones I encounter where I live really aren’t all that aggressive, but…I still don’t like the bastard things). I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I try to respect ALL animals. Wasps are an exception.
When I was little and lived in the city, all I remember seeing was yellow jackets. Now out here on the edge of the Hill Country, I rarely see any yellow jackets, and they are much smaller than the ones I remember from before. They will let you walk within a couple of feet of their nest with no problem, as long as you don’t linger or mess with them. Their sting is very mild, also.
Yellow jackets and I get along fine.
The red wasps, however, come right at you. Just walking the 200 feet of so from my house to my shop, it is not unusual for one to come right up to me and even bump into me. They seem to go for my face, and I have had them try to fly right into my mouth.
The bastards hang around my shop a lot since it is back behind the tree line, but they aren’t satisfied with the rest of my 4+ acres as they are about the area outside the door of my shop.
Fire ants are having a come-back big time this year.
When they first got here, the mounds were everywhere. Around that time I noticed that the ticks vanished, which was nice, but so did the armadillos, most of the rabbits, and possums became less common.
I haven’t seen any “crazy ants” yet, but I’m sure they will find me in another year or two.
I don’t have any problems with spiders, but am always amazed at how they seem to be everywhere, even if you never see them.
I can set a part outside my shop on a bench and spray paint it, go inside and let it dry and come back in about 30 minutes, and there is already a fresh thread of web on it. When I put on a second coat, the spray highlights the thread and it is obvious that it was freshly put there, though there is never a spider to be seen.
And I don’t know what it is about the freshly painted parts, but the flies and gnat luv’em. They don’t get in the paint while it is wet, but they like sitting on the painted surfaces after they have dried a bit. I guess they are huffing the fumes coming off the paint or sump’in.
What is weird is that my house sits on the front 2+ acres, and though there are plenty of trees, the scrub and brush is gone and there is no shrubbery around the house. My shop sits in the back 2+ acres where nothing has been trimmed out in the fifty years I have been here, and with trees and scrub and grass and dead vegetation about, I have only seen one live scorpion in my shop in all these years. An occasional beetle will take a tour every once-in-a-while, and the spiders love the eaves and painted parts, but my house seems like Grand Central Station for bugs for some reason.
I once mentioned the bugs as a reason I left TX and got a few responses about how that was my own weirdness and that most Texans don’t have to deal with scorpions and centipedes, thank you very much. I knew they were liars!
Lets not forget the little brown snakes that manage to get in the house :o I’m told they only eat earthworms… They sure startle the heck outa me,but the cats have a new toy until I find the grabber and put the thing in an escape proof trash basket and carry it across the road…
Agreed. No contest at all.
I’m horrified at the thought of little snakes in the house, and giant flying roaches, and giant grasshoppers, and everything else down south that I haven’t had to put up with in seven years.
I’ll take several feet of snow every winter, TYVM.
The wasps and scorpions are nothing compared to the fire ants. Those things are absolutely from hell.
I’ve seen winters with 30 feet of snow. And I’ll take that too.
Scorpions? In your bed? :eek::eek::eek:
We don’t have fucking scorpions.
SCORPIONS. ON PEOPLE’S BEDS.
I have relatives on the gulf coast, no scorpions or centipedes in their homes.
They have termites instead. And fire ants in the ground.
I lived all over Texas, and dealt with these: fire ants, scorpions, centipedes, cockroaches, “Lovebugs” plastered all over your car during their mating season, cicadas, Daddy Long Leg spiders, tarantulas, other spiders big and small, humongous grasshoppers, webworms (one bad season they covered the driveway/sidewalks), stink bugs, mosquitoes, wasps, all kinds of bees, Yellow Jackets, hornets, biting horse flies, sugar ants, big black ants, slugs, poisonous asps (the bug, not the snake), poisonous caterpillars, JUNE BUGS sticking to your clothes and hair and weevils in the rice and flour. These are just the ones that immediately came to mind.
One year after moving to the San Francisco Bay area, I could count the number of bugs I encountered on one hand. The actual number, not the number of varieties. Some flies and a bee. 
I hear you. I was bitten by several of the little bastards a decade ago and still have scars.
BTW, best treatment I found was to run the hottest water you can stand over the bites. YMMV.
Southern bugs and gators and all those poisonous snakes…and I took that all as par for the course! (Now, I use them as stories to horrify New Englanders with.)
Central and Northeast Florida ex-resident here. I think I ran into most of those (webworms…ugh…they seem to have gone away, but one year that I was in school we needed umbrells so they wouldn’t end up in our Aqua-Net-encrusted hair).
After moving to the Boston area, I noticed bees, the occasional ant, and a few flies.
(Maine is a bit different, but at least I knew what to expect. And there are lightning bugs).
I was so, so hoping to find a species of scorpion that occurs in Sweden or even Scandinavia to show you, but sadly you are correct. No scorpions in Sweden :(. Ah, well - I’m sure it has other things going for it.
Still, beware the hobbyists ;).
Did anyone mention the smoke from agricultural fires in Mexico that blow up through Central Texas?
Really thick haze and smells faintly of burned sugar (very faintly)
Slightly off-topic but possibly humorous.
When I first came to Texas I didn’t know anything about the vile creatures known as Fire Ants. I had my run-ins with scorpions and snakes in Arizona but was clueless to these little critters.
So after moving there, one of my first jobs was a tower crew hand. Working on radio/TV/cellphone towers.
I was the ground-man that day, guiding up a 120 foot FM radio antenna to about 750 feet above me.
Long story short — while helping guide up that particular piece of metal I found my pants had turned a shade of reddish brown.
Brown that was MOVING! All over my legs.
I was standing on a fire ant mound and holy-moley, were they pissed at me.
I had to tie the guide rope off, strip my pants, socks and shoes off, get on the radio and shout "Holy F*, what the ???"**
I have dedicated my remaining life to vehemently hating those bastards.
As Larry the Cable Guy would say:
“Now that’s funny! mumble mumble Lord I’m sorry.”
This thread makes the 5 flies that popped up in my apartment in the past 24 hours not seem as bad…
Speaking of insects … breaking news in Seattle this morning is a semi truck that overturned, spilling millions of BEES all over a major highway. 448 hive boxes of honey bees. They have a slew of beekeepers on site trying to smoke them and load the boxes on another truck. The on-site reporter is getting stung, but assures views that he is not allergic to bees.