Biden swatted away a Brood X cicada crawling up his neck: 'It got me'
- President Joe Biden was spotted swatting away a Brood X cicada before boarding a flight to Europe.
- "Watch out for the cicadas. I just got one - it got me," Biden told reporters on the tarmac.
- Luckily for Biden, cicadas can't sting or bite people.
President Joe Biden may have round-the-clock Secret Service protection, but he hasn't managed to avoid a run-in with one of the billion or so Brood X cicadas that have invaded the mid-Atlantic in recent weeks.
On Wednesday, Biden swatted away one of the bugs that he found crawling up his neck as he prepared to board a flight to Europe at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.
Luckily for Biden, cicadas can't sting or bite people.
"They can't do any kind of damage besides tickling you with their feet," Zoe Getman-Pickering, a postdoctoral fellow studying cicadas at George Washington University, told The Washington Post.
But the insects, which have emerged en masse for a few weeks after 17 years underground, can wreak other forms of havoc. On Tuesday night, the bugs invaded an aircraft's engine and grounded the plane that the White House press corps was scheduled to take to Europe.