I was asked where I come up with the thoughts about plants and animals that I write for this column and the answer is easy…other people! Take for example last month Luanne came up to me and told me about Todd flooding a “huge” wasp out of the ground. She forgot to bring it with her, but I already knew; it was a cicada killer, our largest wasp.

It wasn’t an hour later when Heather asked me if the “Old Wives Tale” is true that the first freeze is six weeks after you hear the first cicadas?

Cicadas are, in a way, true bugs. I know that sounds dumb, because all insects are “bugs” to most people. Taxonomy, the science of naming plants and animals, is ever changing. For old naturalists like me that is frustrating. When I was younger cicadas were placed in the insect order homoptera. The suffix –ptera is Latin for “wing”.

The prefix “homo-“ is Latin for same, so the “same wing” insects. The homoptera were then made into a sub-order in the order hemiptera, or the “half wing” insects; also called the true bugs. So, cicadas joined the giant water bug, stink bug and the box elder bug.

The wasp, which comes from Old English for “weave”, is defined in the Merriam- Webster dictionary as: “…usually have a slender smooth body with the abdomen attached by a narrow stalk, well-developed wings, biting mouthparts, and in the females and workers an often formidable sting…”. Bees on the other hand may have sucking mouthparts and no slender waist and feed on nectar and honey, but they too can have a formidable sting. Both are in the order hymenoptera, translated as “membrane wing” along with the ants.

Back to Luanne’s wasp. The cicada killer will hunt down a cicada and sting it. The sting paralyzes the cicada, but contrary to the name, it doesn’t kill the cicada...yet.

The wasp takes the cicada to the tunnel it has dug in the soil and stuffs it in. The wasp then lays an egg on the cicada and covers the tunnel. When the egg hatches, the larvae feeds on the still alive, but paralyzed cicada for quite some time; actually months! Some reports are that it eats around the vital portions of the cicada thus keeping it alive and in limbo for as long as possible. Gruesome, yes, but then Mother Nature can be nasty! When the cicada is completely eaten, the larvae form a pupa and wait for next year.

The cicada killers emerge in August because that’s when the cicadas emerge. The singing cicadas are the males that are trying to entice a female to come visit. Once they mate the female will lay eggs in the dirt at the base of a tree. The eggs hatch and the small larvae burrow down into the soil where they feed on the plant juices stored in the roots of the tree. Four or five years later, they emerge, climb up on the tree and molt and start singing, starting the process over again…if a cicada killer doesn’t get to them first.

Oh, and Heather, the average first freeze in this area is between Sept. 28 and Oct. 10. Six weeks prior to that is Aug. 18 through the 29. So, yes the “Old Wives” are correct, something us old husbands learned a long time ago!