Sometimes, cold weather isn't a bad thing.

For one: It keeps carriers of Lyme disease at bay.

But, as the summer season quickly approaches, it will soon be time to think about tick bites instead of frost bite, Maine Center for Disease Control Director Doctor Sheila Pinette said.

Although the weather has been cold, it shouldn't keep tick populations low once the warm weather arrives, Pinette wrote in an email. “Although we did have a very long hard winter, it is difficult to predict if this will decrease the tick population as the temperature rises.

“It is never too early to start thinking about ticks. We do see reports of tick activity year-round, with the highest numbers being May through October.”

Because of the late-spring proliferation of ticks, May has been declared tick month, when the governor sends out a message to beware of the small blood-suckers, Pinette said.

“Ticks tend not to be active often in temperatures below 40 F, but they do exist underneath leaves and on deer,” she said. “The bed of leaves and soil can be kicked up by animals or disturbed in other ways, which may enable the tick to attach to a human while walking through the area.”

While more rare than the May to October tick sighting, Pinette said there are still reports of people plucking ticks off themselves in March and April.

With ticks sometimes comes Lyme disease, which can be characterized by a large, bull's-eye shaped rash that can follow bites from deer ticks. In recent years, the number of reported cases have increased, but the figures are still shy of the actual number, Pinette said.

“Lyme disease cases were at an all-time high last year with over 1,350 cases reported. This could be because of more education, more people reporting and being tested. We do believe that tick-borne disease(s) are highly under-reported.”