The Bug Guy Welcome to West Valley in July, Where the Bugs Are Bigger Than Your Rent
Bark scorpions glow under UV light, which means the only thing creepier than finding one in your shoe is finding one in your shoe and owning a black light. Pro tip: ignorance is bliss. Buy the blacklight anyway. You’ll thank yourself later, possibly while screaming. So what’s a Phoenician to do? Hire pest control, obviously — preferably a company whose technicians show up in long sleeves in July without complaint, which alone qualifies them for combat pay. They’ll spray your baseboards, seal your foundation, and look you dead in the eye and say “you might still see some activity,” which is desert-speak for “we have made peace with the scorpions, and so should you.” In the summer pest control isn’t about winning. It’s about negotiating a temporary, sweaty truce with creatures who were clearly here first — and who, let’s be honest, are handling the heat far better than we are.
Let’s get one thing straight: in the West Valley, “pest control” in July isn’t a service, it’s a lifestyle. It’s a full- contact sport played at 115 degrees against opponents who have survived ice ages, asteroid impacts, and your neighbor’s “all-natural” peppermint spray. Take the scorpion. Sonoran scorpions don’t fear the heat — they commute in it. While you’re sprinting from your car to your air-conditioned house like you’re being chased by a small fire, a scorpion is casually strolling across your patio in full sun, sipping nothing, sweating nothing, judging everything. They’ve been doing this since before the dinosaurs, and frankly, they act like it. And don’t even start on the crickets. Every July, we experience what locals affectionately call “Crickmageddon,” when millions of crickets decide that the inside of your garage is exactly where they want to die, loudly, all at once, in a chorus that sounds suspiciously like they’re cheering for their own demise.
Submitted by Larry Cash, of Estrella Mountain Pest Control.
10 Estrella Publishing - The Grove magazine
July 2026
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