On Tuesday, 11 August, in the early morning hours, a plane will fly over Skopje. The City of Skopje has announced aerial disinsection to suppress mosquito larvae. If the weather does not allow it, the operation is postponed to the first following day with favourable conditions, at the same time.

The same morning, a few hours closer, Veles is carrying out its third aerial treatment of the season. It covers the entire urban and suburban area along the course of the Vardar, as well as the Mladost lake recreation centre and its surroundings.

The treatment boundary, literally

The Veles municipality also published the exact boundary: Mladost lake, the village of Otovica, the Jarboš locality, along the Vardar from north of Bašino Selo through Veles, all the way to the confluence of the Babuna river and the village of Gorno Karaslari. In the west the boundary starts from the Prevalec neighbourhood, through Keramidna toward the Kiro Kjuchuk factory and the village of Gorno Orizari.

That is a level of precision we rarely see in municipal statements, and it deserves credit - at least a person knows whether they are inside the zone or outside it.

The beekeepers, again

Both municipalities notify beekeepers to take the necessary measures to protect their bees in good time. It is the standard wording repeated before every spraying, and the whole question hides right there: the notice comes a day earlier, through a statement the beekeeper has to find himself.

A bee does not read statements. A beekeeper working in a field will not open a municipal website at six in the afternoon to learn that at five tomorrow morning a plane will fly over his hives. A direct notification system - a text, a call, a register - does not exist. Why are beekeepers not notified directly, when every other measure in the statement is worked out down to the last locality?

A third spraying, and the mosquitoes are still here

This is the third time this season for Veles. That can mean two things: either the municipality is being thorough, or the treatments do not hold long enough. No statement says how effective the previous spraying was, or whether anything is measured beyond the number of operations carried out.

Aerial larval treatment is a sensible measure in both Skopje and Veles. The question you will not find in any statement is the one that ought to be central: how much the mosquito population drops per operation, and how long before the effect disappears. Without those numbers, a third spraying is just a third spraying.