Linthicum abuzz over mosquitos, bees and state bug spraying

Renee Osborn Knisely kept hearing from neighbors that mosquitoes were getting worse and she couldn’t disagree.

“Two years ago was the last time we had a cookout,” said Osborn Knisely, president of the North Linthicum Improvement Association. “Everybody left because [the mosquitos were] so bad. We were just getting eaten alive.”

The Anne Arundel County neighborhood is close to marshy areas of the tidal Patapsco River with woods nearby, an ideal breeding grounds for mosquitos. So the community group applied to join the Maryland Department of Agriculture’s mosquito control program, discussed the spraying at a March community meeting, shared information around the neighborhood and nobody objected, she said.

In early May, the department OK’d it, along with the adjacent Linthicum-Shipley Improvement Association’s area for spraying on Thursdays starting in June. But things took a turn when Linthicum-Shipley’s group announced it on its Facebook page.

“And then all hell broke loose about the beekeepers and the butterflies,” Osborn Knisely said.

All the buzz

Lindsay Mueller has lived with her family in North Linthicum since 2016. The home has a big yard, littered with mulberries and often filled with playing children.

In the back corner, six hives buzz with the activity of hundreds of bees flying around, and countless more crawling in the honeycombs inside.

She wants to protect the bees, and that’s why she jumped into action when she learned in early May that North Linthicum would be part of the mosquito spraying.

“I could just put them into their hive and cover their hive every Thursday. But it’s going to be sprayed on all their food sources,” Mueller said.

She filed for an exemption and asked her neighbors to do the same.

The insecticide that the Department of Agriculture uses is a low concentration of permethrin, which is widely available to consumers. It’s in many bug sprays and is used to pretreat outdoor apparel to keep ticks away.

Permethrin can kill bees, but ​Scott Larzelere, who manages the state program, said the concentration used in this case “won’t harm” a bee.

The spray is delivered from a truck mount at an ultralow volume of just 0.003 pounds of active ingredient per acre. Spraying can happen between 7 p.m. and 2:30 a.m.

Larzelere said spray trucks in Maryland use less than 3 gallons of the insecticide, even on a “heavy night.”

“We have 10-gallon tanks,” he said. “We fill them up maybe once a week.”

The droplets of the spray are tiny — less than a tenth of the width of a hair, Larzelere said. They dissipate from the environment quickly and are only effective against soft-bodied insects like mosquitos with direct contact.

The agency allows homeowners to file for an exemption. When that happens, the trucks stop spraying with a 300-foot buffer from that home’s property lines.

Larzelere said it’s “not a good idea” to stand in the spray, but the treatment is widely considered safe.

It “doesn’t affect a bird, it won’t hurt a person, it won’t hurt a dog,” he said.

Permethrin is dangerous for cats, however. Since they don’t have an enzyme to break it down, it can build up and cause neurological problems.

Larzelere and others with the department attended multiple community meetings to talk about the spray program and answer questions. Spraying won’t happen if the weather isn’t right or if state observations indicate that there’s not a large mosquito population.

The Facebook of it all

But such assurances don’t erase all doubt, and misinformation can flourish on Facebook.

That’s perhaps how Linthicum became consumed by what Osborn Knisely called “mosquitogate.” Dozens of Facebook posts have garnered hundreds of comments: people asking questions about the program, complaining about the program, criticizing the community groups, and more.

Osborn Knisely removed herself from the unofficial Linthicum group, calling the comments and misinformation “insanity.”

This skeeter fight involves two communities: North Linthicum, with about 700 households, and Linthicum-Shipley, with closer to 3,000.

Osborn Knisely knew the Linthicum-Shipley Improvement Association was interested in spraying, so she advocated for them to be part of the spraying program at the same time she pushed for her own community.

It worked — but Linthicum-Shipley posted less information about the program online and, its residents said, had fewer discussions about it. So when the association posted online about getting into the spray program, residents said they were caught off guard.

“It feels like there was no information, and then all of a sudden a lot was happening,” said Lilly Schwartz, a Linthicum-Shipley resident.

She attended a virtual association meeting after the spraying was announced but left upset because it felt like the board’s attitude was that Facebook communication was sufficient.

“It’s frustrating. Personally, I’m not even on [Facebook] that much,” she said.

In an email, the association’s president, Cara Morris, said the online discussion was “difficult to gauge” because social media can be a magnet for negativity.

Reconsidering the spray program shouldn’t be a “knee jerk reaction to social media attention,” she wrote.

“If we withdrew at the current moment, it would simply be a reaction to the unpleasantness of an online debate.”

Emmitt Broch, who also lives in Linthicum-Shipley, said he learned about the spraying on Facebook. He felt like the association “sprung it on us, kind of out of the blue.”

Broch has two beehives, and, like Schwartz and Mueller, filed for an exemption.

If there’s any silver lining to the mosquito mania, multiple residents said, it’s that it has gotten people to talk with their neighbors and engage with their community.

Maybe that could inspire folks to get involved in the improvement association, Osborn Knisely said.

“We’re really trying to make this neighborhood a better place and bring everybody together,” she said. “Not have wars over bugs.”

Spraying in both Linthicum neighborhoods was supposed to begin June 4. But state agriculture officials said they’ve had trouble hiring people to drive the spray trucks and now hope to begin this Thursday.

So far, between 50 and 60 households have submitted exemptions.