Last month neighbors in the Belair Edison neighborhood in Northeast Baltimore began whispering about their missing mail.

They said that since early July, weeks went by without any notice from the Postal Service about deliveries to Bonview Avenue, Chesterfield Avenue and other streets.

“I thought someone must’ve been stealing my mail,” Keisha Brown said Wednesday.

Sharon Green, who said she worked with the U.S. Postal Service in Baltimore for over 30 years, found it strange.

“Whether sleet, hail, hell or bullets, nothing can keep a mailman from their route,” she said.

She went to investigate at Belair Edison’s local post office on Shannon Drive, where she said postal workers informed her that it was bees keeping them from delivering mail to several streets in her neighborhood.

“Bugs will keep you?,” Green said with confusion in her tone. “It’s disgusting. Because we live here.”

Bees were the single-worded reason curious residents said they got, over the phone with a USPS operator or at the local post office, for the suspended delivery service.

Reached by The Banner last week, the manager of the post office referred questions about why mail deliveries were halted and complaints about a lack of notice to the spokespeople at Maryland’s USPS headquarters.

USPS spokesman Mark Lawrence wrote in an email Friday that mail deliveries were temporarily suspended to the area “out of an abundance of caution” and “due to safety concerns.”

Visitors to Bonview Avenue at any time during the month of July during the past three years likely aren’t seeing bees, residents say. It’s wasps — eastern cicada killer wasps.

Across the lawns on Bonview, these insects are everywhere, and no one can understand why.

Sand-colored heaps dot lawns and sidewalks where they burrow into the ground. It’s where they lay their larvae in paralyzed cicadas, out of which a next generation of cicada killers will grow, and like clockwork emerge again next summer.

About as large as your thumb with white-striped black bodies and wide rust-colored wings, these wasps look intimidating.

But Rafael de Andrade, an assistant professor of environmental studies at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, said that while they are the largest native species of wasp in North America, “they are completely harmless.”

The males have no biting or stinging capabilities, and the females have a stinger, but very rarely use it on humans. Their main target is cicadas.

Residents said that while the wasps look scary, they’ve never been harmed by one. A man who’s mowed the lawns here for the past two years said he’s never been bitten or stung.

“They don’t bother us,” said Beaver Lee, Green’s neighbor on Bonview. She too felt frustrated at the lack of communication coming from the local post office.

Lee said she receives important medications for her diabetes and her grandson’s asthma in the mail from Johns Hopkins. When it did not reach her door, Lee was notified by Hopkins that the medication had been sent back to the medical center. At 65, she had to take the 30-minute bus ride to pick it up for her grandson.

She also said bills were kept at the post office without her knowledge — causing her to delay a month’s payment of her BGE bill that will cost her over $500 next month.

Jeniya M., preferring to use only her first name to not cause trouble, said this year’s batch of wasps was better than last year’s. “You couldn’t walk out of your house. The block was covered,” she said. But in 2024, the Postal Service never stopped delivering to her door.

Jeniya said she fears for her own toddler’s safety as he plays day after day in their front lawn. Nothing she’s tried, from pouring bleach into the nests to spraying wasp killer, has worked to get rid of the annual swarms.

Andrade isn’t sure why Bonview Avenue is such a popular home for the species. It could be that the sandy conditions of the soil and the easy supply of cicadas make the street an ideal destination. While the wasps may be frightening and a nuisance, their presence is important to maintaining local ecosystems, Andrade said, urging residents to let them be, especially because their time out and about will likely end by early August.

After inquiries by The Banner, Lawrence said in an email that as of Aug. 1, “the matter has been resolved, and mail deliveries have been resumed.”

By Saturday morning, Tara Hayes, a resident on Bonview Avenue, said that the mail service had been restored to the block.

In her own tenure in the postal service, Green said she’d never heard of mail delivery being suspended for any reason. She sits on her porch all the time with her grandkids, and the wasps can usually be redirected with a swat, she said.

So it was difficult for her to understand why mail deliveries to her home had been suspended for three weeks, especially without any notice.

“I made sure everyone else got their mail for 31 years,” Green said. “Now I can’t get mine because of bugs.”