From mid-July, the cicada lays
300 to 400 white, 1/10-inch long and 1/50-inch wide eggs,
which are conical at both ends, simular to tiny shuttles.
The Cicada entrusts its laying to a branch or dry bough, size of a straw
to a pencil. It selected a mulberry tree, cherry tree, willow; but its
preference goes towards the dry asphodel (bulbous plant with white flowers)
to the long and smooth stem.
To plunge its eggs in the marrow of the branch, the Cicada is provided
with a oviscape (kind of drill), which creates a scratch, as a from top
to bottom pin plunged obliquely would do it; by the raised woody scrap,
our insect deposits from six to fifteen eggs, withdraws the double saw
of the drill, the scrap is closed again, our Cicada assembles few centimetres
and starts again sowing, and thus, this operation will repeat thirty to
forty times, on one or more stems.
During September, the eggs pass from the white to the fair one; at the
beginning of October, the eyes appear and the blossoming with place by
a beautiful sun of autumn.
By the stem split at the time of the laying, appear the primary larvae,
left tiny fish with a ventral edge (sheath where the legs are placed).
The larva tears this provisional sleeve and is extracted some. This défroque
is retained with the brushwood by a filament.
Our larva remains in this suspended cup, time to take a sun bath, to harden
itself and to take forces, the fair one it passes to amber.
Finally the fall on the ground takes place. Without delaying, the larva
starts to dig to go down in the ground. It digs with its legs of front,
which cut the roots which obstruct it.
Our Cicada begins its four to six years
of underground life.
Some their American cousins drill the basement up to seventeen years,
before leaving for their last moult.
