Back in 2015 we published a story at here (pdf) about some preliminary results of a survey taken at the 2014 LAMM. Since then a full paper has been published, thanks to Steve Martin for sending the link. The good news for us is that he notes in his email that “[the paper] indicates that so long as you remove the ticks even if they are infected with Lyme’s it won’t be transmitted.“
The full text is here (pdf).