Brood VIII of the 17-year species, Magicicada septendecim, Magicicada cassini and Magicicada septendecula Cicadas have begun to emerge over the last few days. I can hear the faint noise of the early risers in the woods across from the house. This will turn into a LOUD and continuous hum over the next few weeks. I find the sound to be quite relaxing.

They are mostly harmless, don’t eat much, just come up out of the ground every 17 years, have sex, then die. Much like he denizens of LGF.

I’ll ry to get a recording/vid of them later as the Brood heats up.

In mythology and folkloreMain article: Cicada (mythology)

Cicadas have been used as money, in folk medicine, to forecast the weather, to provide song (in China), and in folklore and myths around the world.[69] In France, the cicada represents the folklore of Provence and the Mediterranean cities.[70]

The cicada has represented insouciance since classical antiquity. Jean de La Fontaine began his collection of fables Les fables de La Fontaine with the story La Cigale et la Fourmi (The Cicada and the Ant) based on one of Aesop’s fables: in it the cicada spends the summer singing while the ant stores away food, and finds herself without food when the weather turns bitter.[71]

The cicada symbolises rebirth and immortality in Chinese tradition.[72] In the Chinese essay “Thirty-Six Stratagems”, the phrase “to shed the golden cicada skin” (simplified Chinese: 金蝉脱壳; traditional Chinese: 金蟬脫殼; pinyin: jīnchán tuōqiào) is the poetic name for using a decoy (leaving the exuviae) to fool enemies.[73] In the Chinese classic novel Journey to the West (16th century), the protagonist Priest of Tang was named the Golden Cicada.[74]

In Japan, the cicada is associated with the summer season.[75]For many Japanese people, summer hasn’t officially begun until the first songs of the cicada are heard.[76] According to Lafcadio Hearn, the song of Meimuna opalifera, called “tsuku-tsuku boshi”, is said to indicate the end of summer, and it is called so because of its particular call.[77]

In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess Aphrodite retells the legend of how Eos, the goddess of the dawn, requested Zeus to let her lover Tithonus live forever as an immortal.[78] Zeus granted her request, but, because Eos forgot to ask him to also make Tithonus ageless, Tithonus never died, but he did grow old.[78] Eventually, he became so tiny and shriveled that he turned into the first cicada.[78] The Greeks also used a cicada sitting on a harp as an emblem of music.[79]