What Is Active, and When, Around Horry County

Late winter, and the swarm that beats the tourists

The first pest event of the year here catches people out because it happens while the rest of the country is still in coats. Eastern subterranean termites send out winged reproductives on warm humid days from late winter into spring, often in the hours after rain, and they fly in daylight. What a homeowner notices is not the flight but the aftermath: a scatter of small pale wings on a window sill, in a bathtub, along a sliding door track, or stuck to a spider web in the carport.

Wings indoors are worth taking seriously, because a swarm emerging inside the building means the colony is already in contact with the structure rather than out in the yard. Wings on the outside of a window are less pointed but still tell you the pressure is there. Either way, late winter is the right time for somebody to be under the house with a light, because the substructure is where the answer sits, and February is a far more comfortable place to have that conversation than the week before a closing in July.

Timing shifts a little depending on which corner of the county gets checked. Swarmers reported near the US-501 corridor toward Homewood often beat the ones out past Finklea by a week or two, since the pine woods hold cooler ground longer than open lots. Closer to the coast, Myrtle Beach calls tend to come in earliest, warmed by the ocean air well before Conway itself catches up.

• Save the wings in a bag or take a clear photo before sweeping them up, since wings identify what flew
• Check sills, tubs, sinks and door tracks on the sunny side of the house first
• Look at pier faces and block for mud tubes while you are under there
• Move firewood, lattice and stored lumber off the soil before spring properly starts

Spring, the dusk swarm, and the first mounds

Later in spring the second termite species shows up, and it behaves differently enough that it is worth telling apart. Formosan subterranean termites tend to swarm from late spring into early summer, they fly in the evening rather than the middle of the day, and they head straight for light. A porch fixture, a pool light or a lit window can collect hundreds of them in one warm evening. Their colonies get large and they are quite capable of building carton nests above ground in a wall void or a tree, which is why an evening swarm around a coastal house gets a different level of attention than a daytime one.

Spring is also when the yard wakes up. Fire ant colonies push mounds up as the soil warms, and the pattern people notice is that mounds seem to appear overnight after rain. They did not appear, they moved up: heavy rain drives the colony toward the surface where it is drier and warmer, so a yard that looked clear on Friday can carry a dozen fresh mounds by Sunday. Mosquito numbers start climbing in the same weeks, and in the lawn, mole crickets that overwintered as adults begin laying, which is the reason lawn treatment timing in late spring matters more than treating in August when the damage is already visible.

Conway's spring swarm season doesn't stay put at the town line, and the pros we connect you with track it across the whole coastal stretch. Down US-17 on the Waccamaw Neck near Pawleys Island, the salt marsh and creek push swarmers and mosquitoes earlier than inland lawns see them, while Georgetown's rice-country wetlands along Winyah Bay run their own damp, early calendar. That range is exactly why timing advice built for one yard doesn't always fit another.

Deep summer and storm season

By midsummer everything is running at once and the work turns into water management. Mosquitoes breed in anything holding water for a week, and after a coastal downpour that means tarps, boat covers, plant saucers, clogged gutters, wheelbarrows, a corrugated pipe with a low spot and the ditch at the property line. Biting midges, which nobody local calls anything but no-see-ums, come off the marsh and the tidal creek edges in the hour either side of sunset. They are small enough to pass straight through ordinary insect screen, so a screened porch on the marsh side needs a finer mesh than the one that came with it.

Storms drive the indoor sightings. A heavy rain floods drains and saturated mulch, and palmetto bugs move up and out into garages, crawl spaces and kitchens within a day or two. Yellow jacket and hornet colonies are at their largest and least patient in late summer, so a nest in a wall void or under a deck stops being ignorable. Fire ant mounds get flattened by mowing and rebuilt within days, which is why spot-treating individual mounds through this stretch feels like bailing a boat. Broadcast timing across the yard, done properly and once or twice in the season, is the treatment that actually changes the count.

Cool nights, and the move indoors

Autumn is the handover from insects to mammals, and it is the season most homeowners underestimate because the yard finally goes quiet. Roof rats climb, and once night temperatures drop they look for warm dry harborage above ground: attics, soffits, the space over a garage, the crown of an untrimmed palm, a live oak limb touching the roof. The signs are overhead rather than underfoot. Scratching after dark, droppings in insulation near the eaves, greasy rub marks along a rafter, gnawed corners on stored cardboard. Trimming branches back off the roof line and closing soffit and gable gaps in October is worth more than trapping in December.

Insects do not disappear, they relocate. Ants that spent summer in the mulch move into wall voids, and because there is no long freeze on this coast, activity indoors continues through winter rather than pausing. The other winter job is the crawl space. Cool air over damp ground keeps humidity high under the floor, so December through February is a good stretch to get in and deal with a torn vapor barrier, standing water or a sweating line, before the spring swarm arrives to take advantage of the wet wood.

The whole year on one page

The table below is a working summary rather than a promise, because weather here moves the dates around by weeks in either direction. Two thoughts to read it with. First, the right time to act on most of these is before the visible peak, not during it, since a treatment aimed at the moment of maximum activity is always the more expensive version. Second, the stretch between November and February is the only quiet-ish window of the year, and it is when access under a house is easiest, so it is the sensible slot for the jobs nobody wants to do in August.

If you keep one habit from this page, make it a slow lap of the outside of the house at the change of each season. Look at where water lands, whether mulch has crept up the siding, whether a vent screen has torn, whether a branch now touches the roof. Nearly every seasonal problem on this list arrives through something on that lap.