Will a walk in the woods be less buggy thanks to all this snow? Only for now.

The snow is blowing sideways outside, and the temperature is stuck somewhere between ‘brrrrrr’ and ‘Holy Fahrenheit and Lord Celsius, whyyyyy?!?’

It’s awful out there, and we’re only a few days into the year. So is there anything we can look forward to? Any upside to the massive chill pill being forced down our throats? Maybe the cold will kill off the cold-blooded bloodsuckers that make our lives hell in warmer weather?

Not necessarily. While a mild winter can lead to more bugs than usual the reverse is not necessarily true.

In years like 2014, which featured now-infamous polar vortices, bug experts warned that incredible cold doesn’t necessarily doom summer-loving pests—and that’s still true today.

“They’re going to get through this. They are going to make it because they have experienced these kinds of conditions before, and they don’t get wiped out. Maybe we’ll get a little suppression of the ticks, but we’ll see,” says Susan Paskewitz, the chair of the Department of Entomology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Paskewitz’s research focuses on disease-carrying arthropods like mosquitoes and ticks, which tend to be the ones that we worry about most in the summer.

Unfortunately, Paskewitz says, most of the bugs are likely to make it, though it’s going to depend on a lot of factors, including what insects are in your area, how cold it gets where you live, and whether or not you get a lot of snow.

Pesky bugs like mosquitoes and ticks have different ways of dealing with the cold. Ticks are extraordinarily good at burrowing under leaf litter for the cold season, finding a relatively warm spot to hang out in until the cold passes. For these animals, plant debris on a forest floor is as cozy as curling up under a blanket to watch the snow fall outside. And speaking of snow, that just adds another layer of insulation to bugs like ticks that burrow underground for heat when the temperature drops outside.

"I’m going to he be hopeful that because we’re getting really cold temperatures and not much insulation in southern Wisconsin that we may see some impacts on the tick survival next year. Up north where we have a lot more snow, I don’t think so." Paskewitz says.