BEEKEEPER SICS BEES ON DEPUTIES – Apr 29

A Springfield, Massachusetts, beekeeper was found guilty of misdemeanor assault and battery and reckless assault after she set swarms of bees on sheriff’s deputies attempting to evict her friend from her house. Rebecca Woods, 59, admitted that she was trying to save her elderly friend, who has cancer, from eviction by freeing the bees in the presence of the deputies who had shown up to serve papers. Wearing her beekeeper’s suit, Woods drove up to the property with the hives stacked on a trailer, and proceeded to lift the lids of a number of them. In police body camera footage, one officer says: “She’s opening the bees!” Several officers were stung on their heads and faces, and one required hospital treatment. About a thousand of Woods’s bees died during the encounter, many of them crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies, and others because female honeybees die after delivering their sting. A jury acquitted Woods of seven felonies but convicted her on the assault charges.
* It’s like “Willard,” with bees instead of rats.
* I would have loved to hear a deputy shout, “Honey, don’t!”
* Wasn’t this a Sally Field movie in the 80s where the gritty lady beekeeper defeats the nasty local sheriff and saves the cancer friend’s house? If not, it should have been. With a theme song from Sting. STING!!!
* Those sheriff’s deputies were kept busy as… busy as… well, busy as something or other, I can’t think of the word.
* Anyway, that’s the buzz from Springfield.