The Summer Is Almost Here, & So Are Ticks

As the summer gets closer and closer I’m going to talk more about the particular maladies that affect these summer months. One disease that you might have heard of showing up more often during the hotter times of year is Lyme disease. If you’re going to talk about Lyme disease you have to talk about the vector of Lyme disease and that is ticks. Last week we talked about irritable bowel syndrome. This is only slight less pleasant. There are few things more icky than being bit by a tick and trying to pull that little blood sucker off. Then there’s the inflammation and irritation that follows, wondering if you’ve gotten a serious disease from it like Lyme’s or Rocky Mountain Spotted fever or one of the other number of diseases that they can carry. Tick bites are a big deal.

The amount of ticks out there is usually related to the number of deer in the area. The particular tick that carries Lyme disease, the black-legged tick (so if you’ve got a tick with white legs you don’t have to worry about Lyme’s disease) is also called the deer tick. This species of tick hang around deer, hence the relationship between deer and the ticks (and the name). Ticks carry this bacteria once they are infected with it, even as a nymph they carry the bacteria or whatever they have picked up the rest of their life.

I just alluded to the fact that there are different stages of ticks. There are larva, nymphs, and then there are adults. They all look about the same. If you’re using a magnifying glass, one’s just bigger than the other. I know that as a kid what we used to call larva now we would call seed ticks. You could literally have a hundred or two hundred on you real easy. An adult tick would lay an egg and they all hatched out. If you happened to walk right through where they had hatched out you could wind up with a lot of them on you. Those little things, you can hardly see them, which could be a big problem. It’s hard to get 100% of them off of you. Those usually occur later in the summer because the adults have to mature, find an animal to attach to and get some blood from before they can mature and lay their own eggs. Seed ticks are mostly a fall thing.

Where do ticks live? Their habitat is mainly woody, leafy areas with dried leaves or brush. They do not particularly like mowed lawns or groomed areas. The transition from yard to woods, the farther and more brushy you get the more likely you are to encounter ticks.

About 90% of all tick bites occur during May, June and July with June being the highest month. 90% of all tick bites and certainly Lyme disease occurs during those three months. This is prime season right now for tick bites. We’ll talk more about Lyme disease itself in my next post.