New England is a hot bed for Lyme disease due to ideal temperatures and accessibility to hosts for deer ticks. Deer ticks are essentially a threat year-round in New England, but can be slowed down by extreme cold or hot temperatures as well as heavy snow fall. They have a two-year life cycle and search for different sized hosts depending on the season and their current life-stage.

So why spray for ticks in early Spring?

Eliminate adults that survived the winter.

Adult deer ticks go dormant when temperatures are above freezing. Often they find shelter in leaf litter and brush to stay close to the warm ground. Once temperatures begin to warm and any snow cover has melted, they reactivate to lay eggs. One female adult deer tick can lay up to 2,000 eggs. Even further, some adult deer ticks will search for a host for one last blood meal if they were unable to find one before the winter. 

Eliminate eggs that are deposited in leaf litter.

Eggs are fertilized in the fall and deposited in leaf litter the following spring. That's why we highly recommend treating your yard to eliminate ticks through the late fall and starting in the early spring. Property sprays like PROGAEA™ Tick & Mosquito will eliminate eggs on contact, but it will always help to do a spring yard clean-up and eliminate leaves and brush from your yard. That way the spray treatment can access all surfaces in the yard so the eggs have no where to hide.

Stop the two-year life cycle from beginning again.

Immature ticks are called nymphs and they are tiny (less than 2 mm) and difficult to see. They feed during the spring and summer months. Adult deer ticks are much larger and are most active during the fall. When you eliminate the adult deer ticks before they can lay their eggs, or even eliminate the eggs before they hatch, you are reducing the deer tick population for the following two seasons. That means you may not see a reduction in the current season, but you prevented the cycle from continuing the following year.

It's important to mention that although you should spray for ticks in early spring as soon as temperatures drop below freezing, you should continue spraying through late Fall for the best control of deer ticks on your property. Our tick-focused sprays adjust for the season and life-stage of the deer tick in order to eliminate and proactively reduce future populations.