Brood X has been developing for 17 years and will be making their appearance soon.
“In general they’re harmless, you know, they’re just big, noisy, sex-starved bugs,” Howard Russell, an entomologist with Michigan State University, said.
READ: 17-year cicadas to emerge in Michigan this spring: Everything you want to know
The Brood X periodical cicada is a 17-year cicada that last emerged in 2004.
“There’s just a few counties that will see them. The best opportunity to see them will be in Washtenaw County, outside of Ann Arbor. But there are some records of them being in Lenawee County, Livingston County, as far north as Oakland County, up in Bloomfield Hills. At least, they were observed there in 1987. So that would have been two broods ago,” Russell said. “If people want to see them, the best place to see them will be the Cherry Hill Nature Preserve, east of Ann Arbor.”
They are not locusts. They are cicadas. They won’t eat your garden or destroy your flowers. They don’t eat. They only come out to find mates and make more cicadas.
When females lay their eggs they will destroy tree branches, but when the nymphs hatch they find their way back to the soil, burrow in and wait another 17 years. That’s why it’s easy to know where they’ll be nearly two decades from when they emerge.
The sound they make will be constant but will stop during the night.