It is essential that the support, no matter what its nature, should be dead and perfectly dry.

The first operation performed by the Cigale consists in making a series of slight lacerations, such as one might make with the point of a pin, which, if plunged obliquely downwards into the twig, would tear the woody fibres and would compress them so as to form a slight protuberance.

If the twig is irregular in shape, or if several Cigales have been working successively at the same point, the distribution of the punctures is confused; the eye wanders, incapable of recognising the order of their succession or the work of the individual.  One characteristic is always present, namely, the oblique direction of the woody fragment which is raised by the perforation, showing that the Cigale always works in an upright position and plunges its rostrum downwards in the direction of the twig.

If the twig is regular, smooth, and conveniently long the perforations are almost equidistant and lie very nearly in a straight line.  Their number varies; it is small when the mother, disturbed in her operations, has flown away to continue her work elsewhere; but they number thirty or forty, more or less, when they contain the whole of her eggs.

Each one of the perforations is the entrance to an oblique tunnel, which is bored in the medullary sheath of the twig.  The aperture is not closed, except by the bunch of woody fibres, which, parted at the moment when the eggs are laid, recover themselves when the double saw of the oviduct is removed.  Sometimes, but by no means always, you may see between the fibres a tiny glistening patch like a touch of dried white of egg.  This is only an insignificant trace of some albuminous secretion accompanying the egg or facilitating the work of the double saw of the oviduct.

Immediately below the aperture of the perforation is the egg chamber:  a short, tunnel-shaped cavity which occupies almost the whole distance between one opening and that lying below it.  Sometimes the separating partition is lacking, and the various chambers run into one another, so that the eggs, although introduced by the various apertures, are arranged in an uninterrupted row.  This arrangement, however, is not the most usual.

The contents of the chambers vary greatly.  I find in each from six to fifteen eggs.  The average is ten.  The total number of chambers varying from thirty to forty, it follows that the Cigale lays from three to four hundred eggs.  Reaumur arrived at the same figures from an examination of the ovaries.