Have you heard "It's been a mild winter so the bugs will be bad this summer"?

It would seem you’re confronted with a statement that is simply not true.

A similarly annoying statement I hear each and every year is,

“We didn’t have “much weather” (a lot of snow) last year…this year will be bad.”

As if one thing influenced the other…while conveniently ignoring the fact that we haven’t had “much weather” for several consecutive years.

You can’t make sense out of non-sense.

Maybe it depends on where you live and what the local bugs are accustomed to. I do know that here in Texas, if we have a harsh winter, the mosquitos and a few other bugs are not nearly as bad as usual for the rest of the year.

Same here in Florida. If we get a good freeze once or twice, I wouldn’t say the mosquitoes are gone for the rest of the year, but we do get a month or two off.

We had a very mild winter last year here in Illinois, and we did see more bugs than we usually do once spring and summer came along. The mosquitoes weren’t bad though because we had a terrible drought during the summer.

It’s the Spring that will determine the mosquito population around here. If we have a long, wet spring (and a lot of snow to melt), then we can count on an abundant mosquito population to plague us for most of the summer.

On the other hand, if we haven’t had much snow, and if the spring continues to be dry and warm, then we won’t have the pools of stagnant water they require for reproduction, and the swarms will take longer to accumulate.

Sure, there is truth to this. Last year up here in my neck o’ the woods was a really, really bad year for rattlesnakes. A mild winter in 2011/12 and then a heat wave that brought them out in droves over the summer. Mild winter, more rodents exploding in the woods as well.

The problem was bad enough for our county to issue warnings about the amount of snakes and snakebite cases in people and humans. I had 2 monster snakes under my deck in the same evening, one that bit my cat and cost me $600 at the emergency vet.
The vet has 2 more cases of rattlesnake bite in the few hours I was waiting on my cat to be treated. 2 dogs and 1 cat in the same few hour slot. I also had a neighbor get bit on her hand while gardening and knew of several other bites to horses and dogs.

I saw more snakes and heard of more problems than I had in the 20 years prior living in my county. I hope the little bastards are freezing their rattles off right now. lol

Heard it all my life.

Mosquitos love water, lots of water = more mosquitos, not rocket science. Since you’re in a colder climate, the melt probably isn’t as bad as here in Missouri or the lower states.