Male cicada killers don’t sting, and, unlike Asian giant hornets, female cicada killers avoid people and rarely deploy their stingers. Though there are four species of cicada killer in North America, all of them are similar in appearance and behavior.ĭespite their large size and bright yellow and brown coloring, cicada killers are harmless to humans-they’re “gentle giants of the wasp world,” Schmidt says. Since mid-July, cicada killers have been emerging from their underground burrows and buzzing around people’s yards.Ĭicada killers go after the more dependable seasonal cicadas, not the periodical species, such as Brood X, which descended upon the eastern U.S. This paralyzes the cicada, which the wasps then carry back in flight to their subterranean lairs. Females are large, measuring up to an inch and a half in length, and they prey exclusively upon cicadas, which they find, grapple with, and inject with venom. What many people are actually seeing, according to entomologist Justin Schmidt at the University of Arizona, is a harmless native wasp with an equally fierce name: the cicada killer. They are currently confined to the far northwestern corner of Washington State, in part due to a targeted campaign to find them and eradicate their nests.Įven so, the discovery of these aggressive, two-inch-long insects known for decimating entire honeybee colonies led to concern throughout the United States, with many people misidentifying local wasps as murder hornets. You may have heard of “murder hornets,” or Asian giant hornets, which made international headlines after a small number were spotted in the Pacific Northwest in 20.
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