I did a bunch of research on this last year before putting in SMB to my .1 ac pond in Phoenix (6' deep). We've had almost 30 days over 110 degrees this year, and my pond has been well into the 90's. I think you'd be hard pressed to say they can't deal with higher water temps. They're active, healthy, growing, and some of them trained themselves to eat pellets. And yes, they spawned this year and I've got a bunch of YOY SMB in my pond.

My pond is lined in rocks/gravel - and I'm sure that helped. So my suggestion if you want recruitment is to get rocks/gravel and dump in a large portion of the pond - they'll do their thing. (if you want to do more there is info on here about creating perfect beds for them, but in my pond they just found their preferred places.) My belief is that you'd have no issue whatsoever with temps. Just keep good water quality and aeration.

Everyone says that with LMB they won't recruit in the south - but if you're serious about this I'd recommend you try something that I haven't read about anyone doing - and that's creating a large portion of your pond for the SMB by adding LARGE amounts of gravel and rock. Most people put a few rocks on a dirt bottom pond - I'd suggest creating a gravel/rock bottom section of your pond for your SMB. If you've got a 2.5 acre pond, take 5-10% of it, order a bunch of rock/gravel from a landscape company, and dump it on the bottom of the pond. Sure you'd need quiet a few tons of rock, but my bet is that you'd have recruitment. Do a variety with pea gravel, 1-3", and rip rap bigger than 12".

The LMB in your ponds is a different story. They'll clearly outcompete them over the long-run if they're already in there. However, if you put in adults you should be fine with bit of diversification in your fishery. This will be pretty logical, but the more SMB you put in as a % the better you'll be. If you put in 20 fish you're not going to catch them very often. Just depends on how much you love them.