Cicada Killer Wasps Have Arrived. Don't Confuse Them For Murder ...

Cicada killers go after the more dependable seasonal cicadas, not the periodical species, such as Brood X, which descended upon the eastern U.S. in May. Though there are four species of cicada killer in North America, all of them are similar in appearance and behavior.

Despite 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. Male cicada killers don’t sting, and, unlike Asian giant hornets, female cicada killers avoid people and rarely deploy their stingers. You’d actually have to handle them to ever be in danger, says Schmidt, who has received thousands of stings and in the process created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index.

When it does happen, a female cicada killer’s sting is very mild, almost negligible—it feels like a mere pinprick, and hurts less than the sting of a sweat bee, says Joe Coelho, a physiological ecologist at Quincy University in Illinois who studies the predators. For comparison, the Asian giant hornet’s sting hurts much more, akin to being “stabbed by a red-hot needle,” researcher Shunichi Makino said in a previous interview.

But even though cicada killers are a “big, scary-looking insect, they have nothing. They can’t afford to sting you because they call their own bluff. It’s amazing how afraid people are of them based on appearance alone,” Coelho says.

Anatomy of a hunt

To find well-camouflaged cicadas, female cicada killers search trees using their large eyes and keen vision. When they attack, they inject the insects with a cocktail of fast-acting venom, irreversibly preventing the cicada from moving. How it works, nobody knows, Coelho says. But it turns them into zombies of sorts, all the better to be fed upon by the wasps’ young. Research by one of Coelho’s past graduate students showed that envenomated, paralyzed cicadas can actually live longer than normal, healthy cicadas.