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Las Vegas, NV 89130
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Living in the Desert with the Bugs [home] [next topic]
Las Vegas and the surrounding area, being desert country is blessed and cursed with a climate different from most other parts of the US. The Spring is nippy early, warms up beautiful in the late Spring, and suddenly Summer is on us, with a vengeance. The summers are hotter'n the hinges of Hell, it has been said. The HEAT (and that is capitalized on purpose) starts about mid-June and breaks in mid-to-late September. The Fall's climate is wonderful. Shirt-sleeve weather. The nice weather continues into December, late sometimes. I have been watering tomato plants on Christmas Day, in shorts and no shirt. I've lived here for 7 years and besides this year, when it got in the very low 20's once, I'm having trouble remembering any other time it got much into the 20's. This means we don't have snow banks, sheet ice, 80-car pileups due to ice, gridlock due to ice or snowstorms, broken hips falling on sidewalks, and heart attacks due to shoveling snow. We do have floods, believe it or not. When it rains here, not often, it really pours, and the ground isn't very absorbent. The water rushes through the Valley making its way toward Lake Mead, Southeast of Las Vegas, and it's very, very dangerous to drive when it's pouring here. Doesn't happen often, though.

How does this affect the pest population? The good news: We don't have the moisture like, say, Florida or Houston, so we don't have jillions of bugs. For the same reason, we don't have many flying insects, and mosquitoes are particularly not a problem. The bad news: Because we humans live here, there is enough water from lakes and lawns to supply the bug population to a great degree, and......THEY DON'T GET FROZEN OUT IN THE WINTER. The activity slows down from December to February, but never stops, entirely. Our winters are so mild, barring the exceptional "Blue Northers" that blow by, that we have highs in the 70's, a big proportion of the time.

One thing we have noticed about the Las Vegas valley is that while the whole valley has a full "menu" of pests, different areas have different major problems. Ants are everywhere, period. Spiders, too. The other member of "The Big Three", the big cockroaches are far more likely to be a major problem in the older, more fully landscaped areas. The brand-new additions, with little grass, no trees and no bushes don't seem to provide quite enough harborage for them to be in much abundance. The bad news for the brand-new additions is scorpions and sometimes, a lot of scorpions. We get them in in the imported palm trees...we get them because we are disturbing their natural habitat, building new additions. Scorpions not only will hurt you if they sting you, some are so poisonous that under certain circumstances, they can be life-threatening. On top of that, they are hard to get rid of, very mobile, and nocturnal...yes, they are predators and "prowl" at night. The foothills are full of them and the outlying areas get the brunt of the population. As bad as this sounds, there are solutions, not easy ones, but solutions. (More about scorpions in the next topic) Mice can be a problem, not bad, but they are here.

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