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vineyard,” he says. “How do I come in here, tear it all out,
and replant it? It’ll be three years until any production comes
back.” Pre-lanternly, he harvested 3 tons per acre of vineyard
and sold the grapes for $2,000 a ton, grossing $240,000 a year.
Were he to stop producing entirely for those three years, he’d
lose that annual income, to say nothing of the risk that lantern-
lies will infest newly planted vines. Even the grapes that sur-
vive are an oenophile’s nightmare—one winemaker Beekman
supplies told him that batches produced from bug-ridden
Riesling and Traminette grapes are redolent of cabbage.
For the forestry industry, the economic hardships have
thus far been less direct. So far the destruction has been
limited, but the trees’ capacity as carriers has been hurting
companies just the same. “Logs have to get inspected pretty
heavily,” says Don Kellenberger, the owner of a small log-
ging and land-clearing company in Berks County. “We have
to spend more time, and there’s no extra money to do that.
So it’s costing us more, and we’re getting paid the same.”
Some tracts of land in the quarantine zone are so infested
that companies won’t even harvest tree species that lantern-
lies generally ignore, lest they transport the insects into a
new community or into their own sawmills.
“This particular pest is such an excellent hitchhiker,” says
Hall-Bagdonas, of the Northern Tier Hardwood Association.
“It lays its eggs on anything lat. It’s adapting and doing dif-
ferent things every year.” Adult lanternlies, once thought to
be better hoppers than lyers, have recently been observed
winging between trees, for instance. “They were lying into
headwinds and lying further distances than we thought they
could,” Penn State’s Swackhamer says.
Long-distance travel is oicials’ biggest fear. Biddinger sus-
pects it’s only a matter of time until the 15,000 acres of juice
grapes along the south shore of Lake Erie in northwestern
Pennsylvania are hit. Once lanternlies inish feeding there,
they might move to the 30,000 acres of juice grapes across
the border in New York. Maryland and Delaware haven’t been
infested yet, but entomologists consider that more luck than
anything else. The bugs have already hopped past Maryland
to get to Virginia, where egg masses have been spotted by the
hundreds; researchers’ best guess is that a mass hitchhiked
some 180 miles to get there. Even Michigan, with a combined
80,000 acres of blueberry and cherry crops, is eyeing the
spread warily, Biddinger says.
The worst-case economic scenario for Pennsylvania, and
the rest of the country, would be for the spotted lanternly
to overrun the Port of Philadelphia. The lat shipping con-
tainers there would make excellent larval grounds, which,
combined with heavy shipping and trucking traic, could
help the bugs spread quickly to the south and west. Beekman
points out, too, that the port isn’t far from 30th Street Station,
Philly’s main passenger rail depot, visible from the hills of
his vineyard. Ominously, in August parks oicials found
lanternlies in four urban locations, including Center City
and the Horticulture Center at West Fairmount Park, a pop-
ular wedding venue close to the city’s art museum.
“The bugs aren’t good. They’re moving,” says Beekman.
“You’re going to see the spread of this is farther than any-
one projected.”
n a sweltering afternoon, Rick Hartlieb, a 10-year
veteran of the Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry,
drives his pickup truck to a clearing on Gibraltar
Hill, an area of William Penn State Forest about
35 minutes south of Beekman’s grapevines. We
park, exit, and walk over to a lone ailanthus cov-
ered with pockets of lanternlies: a few dozen
ndful there, maybe 200 from trunk to canopy.
Standing beside the tree, I feel a distinct misting sensation,
then notice small droplets on my forearms. “That’s the honey-
dew,” Hartlieb says. I’m being barfed on by bugs.
I soon see that some of the lanternlies aren’t moving.
They’ve been killed, Hartlieb explains, by a chemical called
dinotefuran. The insecticide is classiied as a systemic, which
means it’s sprayed onto trees and absorbed into the plant,
ready to be sucked out by unwitting lanternlies. Hartlieb and
his colleagues have sprayed about 50 trees in this area, part
of a pilot project funded by the state and designed to pro-
duce a measurable lanternly reduction before next spring,
when a new generation spawns. Biddinger is running a sim-
ilar trial on a plot of farmland adjacent to Penn State’s Berks
County campus, spraying potted peach trees and grapevines
with various insecticides, including dinotefuran.
Systemics proved efective in killing the stink bug when it
made its way to Pennsylvania, but the chemicals are costly,
and combating an entire species requires a lot of spraying.
For the forestry industry, the hope is that a single treatment
of a spray such as dinotefuran will last a year; determining
the chemical’s persistence is one aim of Hartlieb’s pilot. “The
important thing is we’re trying. Hopefully doing something
is better than doing nothing,” he says.
68
Bloomberg Businessweek
October 8, 2018
States with habitat suitable for the spotted lanternfly
Counties under quarantine
DATA: USDA; NEW JERSEY DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE; PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE
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