Running Hot and Cold (AKA: Corn and ice cream)
- Chelle Hartzer
- 35 minutes ago
- 3 min read
I heard a new term yesterday, and I figured it was an internet hoax. You know what happens next: I had to investigate and look it up. Turns out, it is a real term—corn sweat*. July is also National Ice Cream Month. What does this have to do with pest control? Great question, thanks for asking.

Let’s start with the heat. It’s hot out there. I swear I saw a cow start to melt yesterday, and even taking a walk first thing in the morning feels like slugging through magma. The “corn sweat” is apparently what’s causing this most recent heat wave/dome/disaster. We know that extreme weather messes with our pests. The bed bugs and German cockroaches don’t care too much because they are inside with us. We are controlling their temperature through our overworked air conditioners and fans. But the outside stuff… they can do some weird stuff.
For the most part, the outside pests are loving this. Since insects are “cold blooded” the warmer it is, the faster they go. Their metabolism speeds up, and they eat faster, grow faster, and reproduce faster. The longer this infernal lasts over the summer, the more generations per year some of these can have. For example, say mosquitoes can have ten generations a year. With the longer “growing season,” they may now have 12 or 13. That’s more pests for longer periods of time. Treatments and other IPM tactics are going to need to start earlier in the season and go later into the fall than previously.

And speaking of all that corn (I won’t get into the monocropping discussion here), there are plenty of hungry hungry pests that want it. Just post-harvest, we have all our stored product pests like maize weevils, flour beetles, Indian meal moths, and so much more. If we have a good harvest this year, there won’t be enough storage space, and temporary and flat storage pops up. So the native, outdoor populations of all those stored product pests are throwing massive parties because the all-you-can eat buffet is now open. This hit the news last year (and many other times) because the flour beetle populations were so large, they were getting into homes and other structures in large numbers.

So what does ice cream have to do with all this? Great question, thanks for asking! I already mentioned our inside air conditioners making it more comfortable. Most people don’t realize how cold tolerant some of our pests are. Businesses that have cold storage are susceptible to many pests, even in freezing conditions. Warehouse beetles can not only survive near freezing temperatures, they can even go into a type of diapause where they shut down until conditions are more favorable. What does that mean? It means all those beetles that may get into storage on or in products are going to “wake up” when they hit the stores, kitchens, and restaurants.

Another pest people don’t think of as very cold tolerant is the humble house mouse. All those freezing freezers that freeze our ice cream…yep, potential mouse habitat. Not only do they survive freezing temperatures, they still reproduce and develop! One study raised them at -3oC; that’s below freezing. You can imagine that once that pallet of Häagen-Dazs rum raisin ice cream hits the local store, those mice can disperse outwards into other areas and other products.
Once again, pest control is needed everywhere. Summer, winter, indoors, outdoors, heat waves, or cold spells all can contribute to pest problems if they aren’t monitored. I could have dug into this way more and gone down plenty of internet rabbit holes, but I have tons of work to get done today, and I can’t afford the distraction.

So if you need some help putting together IPM plans to effectively manage pests in any conditions, call us, that’s what we do. In the meantime, I’m going to find a walk-in fridge filled with rum raisin ice cream. See you in a couple weeks when this inferno is over.
*The oldest reference I could find for this was 2016.... who's got an earlier one?
Okay, I know I said I wasn’t going to go down internet rabbit holes….
Lagniappe – the most heat tolerant insect?
You can have my rum raisin ice cream when you pry it out of my hot hands, but perhaps you may want to try some other flavors? Or this one?
Because we did heat, here’s the most cold tolerant insect.
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