The Garden: Look Out, Here They Come

When Mrs. Thomas A. Taylor went out to weed her garden in Alexandria, Va., one recent morning, she found everything swarming with strange-looking insects.

Some were crawling out of their shells.

They were making a noise that sounded like a rusty saw in a hickory log.* The creatures tiptoeing through Mrs.

Taylor’s tulips were the vanguard of the 1962 class of the periodical cicada—more popularly known as the 17-year locust. Her swarm was the forerunner of a wave called “Brood II,” which will soon take over most of the Eastern seaboard from North Carolina to Connecticut. According to Dr. B. A. Porter, entomologist at the Plant Industry Station in Beltsville, Md., the 1962 plague should be in full swing (and cry) by the end of May, should taper off about the first of July.

American cicadas have a long and well-documented history (those were grasshoppers, not cicadas, in Biblical plagues).

Actually, there are two Fine Old Families amongst cicada aristocracy in the U.S.; Brood II was first noted in Connecticut in 1724, fourteen hatches ago; Brood X was first recorded in 1715. This explains why gardeners, who don’t know about the broods, will be puzzled to find another visitation this year, when the last—they remember distinctly—was only nine years ago in 1953. That was Brood X. To complicate things further, there are Southern branches of the cicada family that appear every 13 years, and in some unfortunate areas, the 17-and the 13-year tribes overlap, sometimes hit exactly the same hatching years.

The most noticeable damage done by cicadas is to young fruit trees, and may take months or years to become evident.

The trouble comes when the female lays her eggs. She picks a tender twig, saws a slit in it with a rasplike ovipositor on her stern, lays her eggs in the slit, and soon dies. The weakened limbs may break or die too. After several weeks the eggs hatch, the larvae crawl out and drop down on the ground where they bury themselves for 16 years, 10½ months. Then, on the first hot day of May, they climb out of the ground, shed their shells, sprout wings and start a plague.

Are 17-year locusts any good to anybody? Dr. Leland Howard, a pioneer entomologist, decided in 1885 that they might be good to eat. His report: when broiled they are flabby—nothing but skin; most palatable method is to fry them in batter, when they remind one of shrimps.

But, he concluded: “They will never prove a delicacy.”

* According to Department of Agriculture Leaflet No. 340 (The Periodical Cicada), the noise goes: “Tsh-ee-EEEE-e-ou” … or sometimes, “AH-O-oo.”