Bark Scorpion Sting: What to Do in the First Hour

What to do in the first hour

The Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center's first aid for a scorpion sting is short: clean the site with soap and water, apply a cool compress, position the limb comfortably, use an over-the-counter medication for minor discomfort as needed, and call 1-800-222-1222 so its experts can decide whether you need a hospital. That is the whole protocol. It looks underwhelming for something that hurts this much, and that is the point.

Two things worth knowing while you dial. The Tucson poison center fields 900 to 1,500 scorpion sting calls a year, per the University of Arizona Health Sciences, so nobody there will be surprised by yours. And Arizona has a real antivenom for this: Anascorp, tested at the University of Arizona's VIPER Institute under Dr. Leslie Boyer and approved by the FDA on August 3, 2011. The serious stings are the treatable ones, which is a better fact to hold at 2 a.m. than most of what you will find online.

What the next few nights look like if you stop at the ice pack

The bark scorpion that stung you did not wander in from the desert, and that is the uncomfortable part. Picture the block wall along your side yard, six steps from the door you walk out of barefoot. In University of Arizona Cooperative Extension research on where scorpions shelter, 95 percent chose hollow block walls over every other option, and the extension notes that Arizona bark scorpions are not territorial and are usually found living with others, sometimes in dense populations. That wall is not holding one scorpion.

Now run the week forward. Tomorrow night your hand goes up the hallway wall toward the light switch, past a spot you cannot see. Thursday your kid pushes a foot into a sandal that sat by the back door all day. Sunday you lift the pool towel off the deck, the exact damp thing the extension warns is extremely attractive to a scorpion looking for moisture, and you feel it before you see it. Same wall, same doorway, same hour of the night, working through your household one person at a time. The sting you already had was the cheap warning.

Symptoms to watch, and the ones that mean go now

A bark scorpion sting typically starts with immediate local pain and very little swelling, which is the opposite of what most people expect. The Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center adds that numbness and tingling are frequently reported and may travel across the body, and that the stung area often turns sensitive to touch, pressure, heat and cold. A light tap near the site feeling like a hammer strike is normal here. Alarming, but normal.

These are the ones that change the plan. Banner Poison and Drug Information Center says to seek medical attention immediately for worsening chest pain, muscle spasms or breathing trouble, and trouble swallowing belongs on that list. In children, Banner tells parents to watch for a child rubbing their face, the signal for numbness and tingling they cannot describe yet, and the Arizona center notes that small children can show jerky body movements and wild eye movements. Small kids and older adults feel these hardest. If your two-year-old got stung tonight, do not wait the hour out. Call the poison center now, or 911 if any of the above shows up.

What not to do

Skip the folk remedies, all of them. Banner Poison and Drug Information Center is specific that tourniquets should be avoided because they can do more harm than good, and nothing in the poison center guidance involves cutting the site, drawing venom out, or applying heat. Alcohol is not pain management here either. If anything is spreading past the sting, do not drive yourself, get someone else behind the wheel or call for help.

One more: do not go hunting the scorpion barefoot at midnight in a temper. Understandable, counterproductive, and a fine way to collect the second sting of the evening. It will still be there at nine tomorrow night, and you will have a UV flashlight by then.

Find where it came from before dark

Finding the harborage is the part that actually stops the next sting, and you can do most of it in one evening. Bark scorpions glow bright blue-green under ultraviolet light, so a cheap UV flashlight turns an invisible problem into a map. Wait for full dark, ideally 9 to 11 p.m. when the extension puts peak movement, and walk it slowly.

• Sweep the block wall first, especially the weep holes, the cap, and where the wall meets the house. That is where the extension research says they overwhelmingly are.
• Then the doorways. Get on the floor and look at the light under your exterior doors. A gap you can slide a business card through is a gap a bark scorpion flattens through, and door sweeps cost less than a service call.
• Screen the weep holes with coarse steel mesh, never caulk them shut, because those holes ventilate the wall.
• Clear the ground contact: woodpiles, stacked pots, clutter against the house, branches touching the roof. Hang the pool towels.
• Shake it out. Shoes, sandals, folded towels, kids' bedding. Locals do this on autopilot.
• Change the porch bulbs to yellow. White light pulls in the crickets and roaches they hunt, which is the whole reason your house is interesting. Our guide on what bark scorpions eat around a Tucson home covers cutting the food supply.

While you sweep walls you will find black widows in the same weep holes. They are scorpion food and they hold the same real estate, so spider control in Tucson usually gets handled on the same visit. Timing matters too: if this happened in July or August you are in peak season, and our month-by-month scorpion season guide explains why sightings spike right after a monsoon storm floods those walls.

When one sting is a house problem, not an accident

A sting stops being bad luck and becomes a structural problem at a few specific points. If any of these describe your house, sweeping and sealing on your own will not close it out:

• Two stings in one season, to the same person or to two people in the household.
• A UV walk turns up more than a handful on the house itself, the stucco, eaves and garage, not just out on the wall.
• You are finding them indoors repeatedly, meaning they are using a gap you have not found or already living in the structure.
• Small children, an infant or an older adult live here, and you are now checking beds at night.
• You find a female carrying young on her back. The extension reports litters of roughly 25 to 35 riding for one to three weeks, so that one animal is next month's population.

If any of those match, hand it off. Call (888) 217-8578, describe your Tucson-area home and what you found on the wall, and we connect you with a licensed local provider covering your ZIP code who prices it on the call. Ask about sealing and wall void treatment, not just an exterior spray. Any figures you hear around town are typical market ranges, not a quote.

None of this is a reason to feel unsafe in your own house. Tucson runs on block walls and warm nights, scorpions come with the address, and the households that stop getting stung are the ones that sealed the doors and got the wall treated. Do the first aid, make the poison center call, sleep on it, handle the wall this week. Our scorpion control in Tucson page covers what that treatment involves.