Brood XIV should be joining us possibly as early as next week. You may soon notice the small holes in the ground from which the nymphs emerge. This is the “every seventeen years” variety.
For five or six weeks the sound that you hear outside will be the same as the sound that will be ringing in your ears all the time if you don’t turn your speakers down.
We will have a little bit of quietness for three years and then the thirteen year cicadas will be back.
Usually I grumble about these pests along with everyone else in Southern Ohio, Kentucky, Northern Tennessee, Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, Southern Pennsylvania, Western parts of Virginia and West Virginia, and parts of New York and New Jersey. But the step-daughter and granddaughter (who haven’t spoken to me in two years and who have emotionally put me out to pasture) are both terrified of cicadas and other flying insects.
Now, wait just a damn minute. This is different brood than the horrors of 2004!? I was assured when I moved here that I would only need to put up with these things every 17 years. It’s only been four. I don’t like Cicadas. How many broods are there and when is the next emergence? /cry
The annuals don’t bother me much. There aren’t as many, I guess. My one experience with the periodicals in 2004 was that they are plentiful, deafening, and the LAND IN MY HAIR!!! :eek:
My daughter (who was age 5 at the time), OTOH, was fascinated with them and is looking forward to the next emergence. I have pics of her with cicadas she attached to her t-shirt. She’s weird.
We get those here in Vegas too. Thier cycle is all messed up as they come every 4 or 5 years or so. It brings back memories of working in the hot sun with sweat running down into my eyes. They used to bother me to no end. When I was a child I would shoot them off the tree limbs with my bb gun. What a little ass I was when I was a kid. Well, they don’t bother me much anymore as I have 4 large pine trees in my back yard and I guess they don’t take to them much. Still hear them in the heat of the day when I’m lucky enough not to be at work. Little buggers.
I’m with you; I love the cicadas around here. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced one of the mass invasions, just the varieties that are here every year. The only problem is that they draw cicada killers, which are darn freaky, even if they are supposed to be harmless to anyone that isn’t a cicada.
A very large wasp that digs burrows. They capture cicadas and drag them off to their burrows, where their bodies will serve to feed the next generation of cicada killers. Two years ago, I had a large colony of them out back and they were pretty aggressive when I was in the area. I’ve wacked a couple with a shovel, but they look big enough to shoot with a .410! Wikipedia
I don’t usually like to use Wikipedia as a source, but their chart makes more sense to me than anything else I have found. It shows the different broods, the areas of the country where they appear, where they are expected back again and whether or not they are on a thirteen year cycle or a seventeen year cycle. Just click here and scroll down a little bit.
I’m no expert, but those things that sound like cicadas-lite that come back every year are what we call “July flies.” They don’t create quite the racket that swarms of cicadas do. But maybe you have something else in mind.
