If you’ve lived through a Las Vegas summer, you’ll know the sound of the cicada.
That constant buzzing can be mind-numbing. But cicadas are harmless; they don’t bite. They won’t eat your garden veggies. They’re making noise so they can find a partner to bed down with.
But let’s face it, bugs freak people out.
Our state is home to cockroaches, spiders, scorpions, bees, crickets, a whole host of ants—and literally tons more.
Most are safe but it never hurts to learn more about them, so you don’t have a heart attack if you find a cockroach sitting on your shoulder or a scorpion on your living room couch.
Jeff Knight is the state entomologist for the Nevada Department of Agriculture.
Bees and wasps
Things like honeybees are very dangerous, especially in Southern Nevada, where we have the aggressive Africanized bees. There are also several of the social wasps, the yellowjackets and stuff that can be dangerous.
The approach that we take at the department is that any unmanaged colony in Southern Nevada within the Africanized bee quarantine zone is considered Africanized, so as far as taking care and being careful, if you're out hiking, and you hear bees, you need to get away from them. And or in your backyard. If you have bees made a colony on a brick wall or in your tree, they need to be taken care of. They present a definite public health. We never know what might set off these bees. You have a different perfume on or something or movement and the bees will attack you.
Ants
The red and the large harvester ants we call them, their mating flights, their reproductive flights are created by thunderstorms. It's about eight days after a thunderstorm and we'll start having flights and reports of them coming in. And they congregate on the top of houses and chimneys and stuff like that. The other thing that we see in Southern Nevada is there is a couple different species of termites that do the same thing. And they'll come out in mass, and people will see huge numbers of wings and stuff where they dropped off. Basically, mate, and go off and try and find a colony. Luckily, most of these never make it. They're starting new colonies.
So, you need to get a quarter inch of rain. I mean, don't ask me how they know it's been a quarter inch.
Scorpions
No, size has absolutely nothing to do with it [In the myth that the smaller to more potent]. More color. All our native species of scorpions that range in size as adults, from about an inch and a quarter up to the desert hairy scorpion that's maybe four and a half or five inches long, are really pretty mild there. They're not really considered very dangerous … just a sharp needle or pinprick type of thing.
There is an introduced scorpion in Southern Nevada, the bark scorpion, it is considered venomous. And there have been reports, no deaths been recorded from Nevada from it, but we've had a couple of hospitalizations that have been brought to my attention.
We go out on the job looking for them around town at night with a blacklight. You find them feeding on cockroaches a lot of times, so they're doing some good out there
Spiders
I relocate spiders around my home. And even my wife does the same. The only time I've ever controlled any kind of spiders, if I'm in an area that I'm going to have to work like a sprinkler box or something like that, then yeah, unfortunately, you want to take precautions. You don't really want to get bitten by spiders, even though spider bites are extremely rare. I mean, in my career, spanning some 40 years, I probably can count on two hands the number of verified spider bites, where the person saw or captured the spider.
Jeff Knight, entomologist, Nevada Department of Agriculture; Allen Gibbs, professor of life sciences, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
