Look at your calendar and circle the last two weeks of May.

No it’s not an entry for your social calendar, but a date when you will receive more guests than you bargained for. Those guests coming to your house and more prone to drop by in your landscape are the 17 Year Periodical Cicadas.

Yep, this is the year for the 17 Year Periodical Cicada for most of us.

That’s the bad news so here is the good news. They won’t be a problem in certain parts of the WSAZ viewing area. Generally if you draw a line from Lewisburg to Beckley to Charleston to Point Pleasant and even over to Jackson County, Ohio, anywhere north of that line will have less of a problem. As for Kentucky, anywhere you see this program this morning you are fair game for the 17 Year Periodical Cicada. So there you have it, Southern West Virginia as well as Southern Ohio as well as a good chunk of Eastern Kentucky will be affected.

Their name well describes their life cycle. After the Cicada enters the ground as an egg, it matures to the point that it lives off the roots of mature oak, maple, dogwood, apple and even crabapple trees. In 17 years, like clock work, they emerge during the month of May depending on the soil temperature.

You aren’t going to control their emergence but you can cover certain trees.