By Dan Klepal
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Harvey Howard collected cicadas the last time they came and has used them as bait for fishing. Photo provided

SILVERTON - Be careful when reaching for the butter at Harvey Howard's house.

The 69-year-old collected and froze hundreds - if not thousands - of periodical cicadas in 1987, the last time Brood X emerged from the ground around Greater Cincinnati.

Brood X, the largest of the cicada generations that are expected to number in the billions in Greater Cincinnati alone, will emerge again next month. Dr. Gene Kritsky, a biology professor at the College of Mount St. Joseph and a cicada expert, has predicted the red-eyed bugs will emerge en masse starting about May 21.

"They look just like new," Howard said of his frozen specimens. "They look like they were born today."

Howard says he fishes with them, and sent his grandson, Keith Allen, a fourth-grader at Silverton Elementary School, to class with a handful of them Tuesday for a science project. Howard says blue gill, croppy and catfish are particularly fond of the bug.

"They're kind of delicate," Howard said of the bugs that have been dead for nearly two decades. "Once you get them on the hook, you have to kind of ease them into the water."

Howard said he collected most of the bugs from his front yard. He also enjoys woodworking and collecting coins - hobbies his wife preferred to the cicadas in the freezer.

"She thought I was crazy," Howard said of his wife, who has passed away.

Periodical cicadas bury themselves in the earth for years - sometimes 13 years, sometimes 17 years - before emerging when ground temperatures reach 64 degrees in the spring.

They shed their juvenile skin and fly into trees, where males try to attract females with a song. Females then cut into newly grown tree branches to lay their eggs.

Adult cicadas die off by late June; the eggs hatch and tiny cicada nymphs fall to the ground and bury themselves in early August.

E-mail dklepal@enquirer.com