 Cicadas, I think most people probably recognize them as locusts. They're not a locust. A locust would be a grasshopper. Cicadas are actually a true bug, or we would call them homopterans or hermipterans, but they are actually completely unique from a grasshopper. They live most of their life underground, and then they actually emerge, and then they feed on sap, what we would call them, so sap feeders. They feed on the xylem or the water transport systems of trees. When they're underground, they're feeding on tree roots, they're inconsequential when you think of damaging trees and things like that, and when they're adults, they also are inconsequential, unless we're in a year where we have a brood emerging right here, and so every year you'll see cicadas, and they're green, and they got black or green eyes, and we call those the dog day cicada, but the ones that we are all talking about right now and everyone's seeing in the news, that's actually the periodical cicada, and specifically this year the big emergence is brood tin. Brood X is what everyone's calling it, but it's a Roman numeral, so we're supposed to say it, but periodical cicadas, they're very unique, almost completely unique to Eastern Arkansas. I think I read one time that whenever European settlers came over here, I thought it was a biblical plague because they don't have cicada emergencies like this, and so when they first saw a brood tin emergence, they thought they had done something wrong and they had come to a land they weren't supposed to be in, but the big thing is, you know, 17 years or 13 years is how long these cicadas spend in the ground as immatures before they come up, and you know, here in Arkansas we don't have 17-year cicadas, we actually only have the 13-year variety, and so we don't actually have the periodicals coming out this year. So this year is unique because brood tin is the biggest brood. I think I saw a number of something like 1.6 million of cicadas will come across an acre in parts of the eastern United States. It has the biggest range, and it coincides with our biggest population. So we have, I think, an estimate of multiple billion up to a trillion cicadas coming out where we have tens of million of people live, and so brood tin is the big one that everybody watches out for because all the people up in the northeast are not used to insects like this, you know, here in Arkansas, we're a bit more used to being plagued by insects, but I think they're a little less used to it because a lot of places are big urban centers that where they're going to come up at. They emerge from the ground, the males are going to emerge first. That's the loud noise you hear. If you ever gravitate off the ground, if it yells, it's a male. If it doesn't, it's a female. So males are the ones that are calling. Females come up about a week or more later or a bit later than males, and what happens is they mate, and then the females have to lay their eggs somewhere, and so they cut a slit in a branch or the stem of the tree, and so that leads a wound, we call it an oviposition wound, which is what an entomologist would call it, but an egg laying wound. They look for branches or stems that are from about three sixteenths of an inch up to about seven sixteenths of an inch, so just under a half inch in diameter. That's where they'll lay them, and so the damage is if you have a ton of these things coming out and they're laying eggs all over a tree, then what you'll see is a lot of death occurred on these small branches, and if it's a small tree, it can actually kill the tree. So young fruit trees could be affected to the point where they would die. Large trees, like a homeowner's tree or something, not a big worry. You'll see it, you'll see what we call flagging, which is just where the stem is going to be dead right past where they lay the eggs at, but mostly it's just going to do a little bit of damage, it won't matter. But for a fruit grower, losing limbs is a big deal, and so it could cause damage even at a somewhat smaller level of egg laying, but on a normal year with normal cicadas, we got no issue at all. So there's a few resources online. The one I always go to is called cicadamania.com, and they have a Twitter and a Facebook and everything else, and basically people just write in, here's where we're seeing them, here's how many we're seeing, and there's maps associated with that. The Wikipedia page is actually pretty good as well, and it actually involves an up-to-date map that shows all of the broods, where they expect them to come out, and what year they came out last, and which one they'll come out next, and it's pretty easy to track. It's a 13-year cicada, we know it came out in 2011, like the one we had in Arkansas, we know it's coming back in 2024. Now if you're a fruit grower, you really need to be concerned, and you need to go out and watch, and so just check for them. If there's going to be enough damage that it concerns you, you'll be able to find them when they start coming out, because there'll be a lag in when they come out and when they start damaging, because the males come out first, you'll see all the little skins like you're used to, and then you'll hear them as well, and then the females come out. What we recommend is a pyrethroid. If you're in a brood ear, if you're seeing them on your farm, pyrethroid applications may be every three to five days or so, until you're not seeing them come out anymore, and pyrethroids do a pretty good job of knocking them back, but there's always associated risk with killing your natural enemies, killing your pollinators, and so you really want to make sure they're there, and you're in a brood ear for your area before you start trying to use insecticides for them.