It seems like only yesterday that a Massachusetts beekeeper was charged with seven felonies for opening a bee box, but in fact it was October 19, 2022. And while the proceedings took much longer than I would have expected, based on prior research I’m not too surprised that they resulted in some jail time. See “Are Honeybees ‘Dangerous Weapons’?” (Oct. 21, 2022). According to reports, the beekeeper in question was sentenced this week to six months in jail.
As you will recall, Rebecca Woods was charged with multiple counts of assault after she allegedly set loose thousands of bees in the presence of deputies who were trying to evict one of Woods’s (human) friends. Well, she did set them loose, as she later admitted and as this YouTube video makes reasonably clear. But she seems to have argued at trial that she had no intent to harm anyone, and had only released the bees so they could “enjoy the lovely, flowering landscape” in the area. The landscape was also infested with deputies, though, and the jury does not seem to have believed that was a coincidence.
That said, the video of the incident shows this was hardly the apocalyptic scenario you might have expected given that it resulted in seven felony charges. According to the report, “several officers were stung on their heads and faces,” and “one required hospital treatment.” But as I noted last time, while police claimed “some” of the deputies were allergic to bees, statistics suggest that was very unlikely to be true; and I’ve seen no evidence that the one deputy taken to the hospital suffered from anaphylactic shock. It seems a lot more likely that his “elevated heart rate” was caused by his decision to tackle a 59-year-old beekeeper than by the bees themselves. But I’m speculating about that.
It sounds like the jury also believed this was overcharged, because it acquitted Woods of all seven felony counts. It’s not clear from the report whether these were the original “dangerous weapon” charges, but as we discussed, under Massachusetts law bees probably fit that description. So my guess is the jury just thought this was overkill. It did convict her of four misdemeanor assault charges and two counts of reckless assault (probably also misdemeanors).
This week, the judge sentenced Woods to six months on those charges. According to her lawyer, with time served she will be out in two weeks anyway. Woods was reportedly arrested in Tennessee and fought extradition (but lost), and has been held without bail since being returned to Massachusetts. (I searched Westlaw for “fugitive beekeeper” and even “fugitive /s beekeeper” but got no results.)
Finally, kudos to The Guardian for refusing to let society ignore the real victims in this case: the bees. “[A]bout a thousand of Woods’s bees died during the encounter,” it reported, “many of them crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies trying to arrest her, and others because female honeybees die after delivering their sting.” I assume that “about a thousand” is based on a careful reckoning by a court-appointed bee expert and not just a number that Woods threw out there. Regardless, while I don’t really buy the deputies’ story here, I do sympathize with the bees. They have enough trouble these days without humans getting them involved in dispute resolution. Leave the bees out of it.
