Six-Month Sentence in Bee-Assault Case

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,…