I think the answer to OPs question is: Columbia Missouri. North of there things drop off, Recluses, etc. I grew up in SWMo and we had all that shit. Scorps, recluses, widows, copperheads, rattlers and moccasins. I was bitten by a recluse and copperhead in the same summer on different Boy Scout camp outs.

How did they get a billboard away from the pot vendors?

Fire ants aren't big, but they're major asshoe. I wonder how far north those have gotten.

Seems to me NE and PNW have it pretty easy regarding bugs. I saw my first cockroaches in Iowa City then Honolulu. But I also saw my first firefly—pretty damn cool. We have some mosquitos but they are fairly limited an small. No big ass insects and very rare poisonous ones (recluse). Bald face murder hornets are the bitch but easy to locate and eradicate.

The rain and cold discourage most of those vermin it seems.

Hmmmm, some of the nastiest tick infestations I’ve seen were in Belize, right alongside fire ants.

VA/KY. Thereabouts

Mosquitoes are the unofficial state bird up here.  

What's weird is it seems like the areas with the coldest winters have it the worst.  I remember growing up (Ohio) everyone wanted a good hard freeze to kill as many off as possible.  Up here they survive -60 or worse in the interior.  We get them here in the valley and down in Anchorage but not near as bad as it is up in the interior.

I love catching all the big insects and spiders in Texas!

whats the larvae of the last pic?

That’s a grub

Ground applied Imadaclorpid is your friend.

Bullet ants are said to have the world's most painful sting. Some say the pain is like getting shot with a bullet!


The immense pain comes from Poneratoxin, a paralyzing neurotoxic peptide that inactivates sodium ion channels in your body, affecting the central nervous system; this venom is considered a neurotoxin.

Rhino beetle, they get a lot bigger, some are the size of smoked sausage links lol

Pretty sure that is the larva of a rhino beetle.

The Dobson fly posted will freak you out if they land near you and you have never seen one.  Like a small bird!

Chiggers are tiny, but they are the spawn of the devil

I've lived in the deep south all of my life.

I went to Canada for a fishing trip once,  let me tell you, Florida mosquitos aint got shit on Canadian mosquitos!

Once you get in areas that get hard, and lengthy, freezes, the big bugs start to go away

I remember riding my motorcycle on a back road in FL and a big tortoise was sitting in road. So I picked him up and walked into this orange grove. Must have walked 50 yards and I just happened to look up and there right in front of my face was the biggest spider I’d ever seen spread out on web. It was as big as my hand. It was black & white,basically looked like a giant widow.  The hair on my neck stood up,dropped turtle and got the F’ outta there!!

The 49th Parallel.

yep but was asking for more. im a very amateur entomologist

thank you to the both of you.

https://texashillcountry.com/3-facts-texas-centipedes/

Came across a few of these working in Texas earlier this year..

We just have mosquitos here. What they lack in size they make up for in quantity and sheer perseverance of the will.

Also some rattlesnakes, copperhead, and cottonmouth snakes and some brown recluse and black widow spiders but the spiders never really get that big which is where they getcha when you're doing yard work.

We have black widows and brown recluses here, but they're not common.  I have quite a few walking sticks by me and I've seen a few praying mantis as well.  Mosquitos might as well be the state bird, but Chicago tourists are pretty much the nastiest bugs to be found here.

Tarantula hawks are nasty on paper - their sting is the second most painful of any insect. But, they're actually very docile. I ran into a group of about a dozen outside Bakersfield, within a foot or two of them, and they just ignored me.

On the other hand,

Had a realtor in Texas tell me those are “water bugs” and “welcome to Texas” as I surveyed a few thousand of them dead littering the floor.

I actually got into a gun fight with the one I posted above. They normally are pretty chill, but I spend a lot of time in their territory, so I run into some assholes sometimes. I was out alone that day, middle of nowhere on a huge ranch I lease. That one started making strafing runs at my face, so in my infinite wisdom, I started shooting at it with my Taurus judge with #6 shot. BAD idea, as it is a lot harder to hit a 3" flying object than I expected. I probably looked like a crazy man from a distance, blasting away at an invisible enemy, emptying my firearm, then using it as a shitty club to swing at it, but you gotta do what you gotta do when you're about to be stung by one of satans minions. Turns out, catching them by swinging your hat, then throwing your hat on the ground and jumping up and down on it with both feet works better than trying to shoot them (they're tough as fuck, one stomp just pisses them off, you gotta really get after it).

I've swung and hit them with shovels, with an audible "ping", using a swing that John Mackinroe would be proud of too, only to have them stop mid air after they bleed off some air speed, and reverse direction to make another run at me. That particular one I felt like I was playing the most high stakes game of winged-death tetherball ever, because no matter how hard I hit that fucker, it shrugged it off and came back more pissed every time. Finally got a good smack that scrambled it's cpu, and it hit the ground so I clubbed it with the shovel a few times like an angry caveman, then used the tried and true double foot stomp method to finally end its reign of terror.

Man fuck those things!