I've been an alley cat

TUTTON AND OTHERS v. A. D. WALTER LTD

The tort of bees. This is a case I came across recently in my studies. This is just the headnote btw, the case is a lot longer obvz.


The plaintiffs kept bees near land farmed by the defendant company and upon which grew a crop of oil seed rape. The flowers of rape, although self-pollinating, were particularly attractive to bees. The crop was affected by seed weevils to a degree which justified control by spraying with an insecticide. The insecticide was known to be dangerous to bees and the advice to farmers from both government agencies and the manufacturers emphasised the need to protect bees by not spraying during the flowering period and that the insecticide was most effective when spraying took place after the flowering period. In early June, while the oil seed rape was still substantially in flower and being worked by the bees, the defendants, having given a warning only 24 hours earlier to only two of the five plaintiffs, sprayed the field with insecticide, killing the bees.

On the plaintiffs' claim for damages in negligence for the loss of their colonies of bees:-

Held, (1) that, although the defendants were carrying out a lawful activity on their land and neither invited nor needed the presence of the bees to pollinate the crop, it was unreal to divide bees into the categories of invitees, licensees or trespassers, since it was inevitable from the use to which the defendants had put the land that the bees would be present in large numbers during the flowering season; that the defendants owed a common duty of care to neighbouring bee keepers since they knew of their presence in the neighbourhood, had knowledge of the danger to bees of spraying during the flowering period and had the bee keepers in their contemplation before

they began spraying; that in failing to comply with published recommendations in circumstances where a later spraying would have been more advantageous to the defendants and less damaging to the colonies of bees, the defendants had not exercised the standard of care required and, therefore, were in breach of the duty owed to the plaintiffs.

(Donoghue v Stevenson applied)

III. NATURE. XV. THE BEE.

Like trains of cars on tracks of plush
I hear the level bee: A jar across the flowers goes,
Their velvet masonry

Withstands until the sweet assault
Their chivalry consumes,
While he, victorious, tilts away
To vanquish other blooms.

His feet are shod with gauze,
His helmet is of gold;
His breast, a single onyx
With chrysoprase, inlaid.

His labor is a chant,
His idleness a tune;
Oh, for a bee's experience
Of clovers and of noon!

by Emily Dickinson

Beekeeper's Maxim

costume

I guised as a bee

I met a pumpkin

buried in honey

WE ALL LOVE HOENY!! But do you like it so much you want to be buried in it???

The body of Alexander the Great was placed in white honey in a golden coffin. Agessilaus, king of Sparta was transported home when he died in Libya in 360BC (before the invention of plastination) We can understand why, as the only truly preservable food, honey would be an appropriate liquid in the hot climates of Libya and Babylon, to keep human remains fresh on the way to wherver they were going.

But then there is the funny case of the first four Earls of Southampton, the Wriothesleys. The bodies of the Earls were interred in four sealed lead coffins in a vault in the parish church of St. Peter in Titchfield, Hampshire.

Word on the street was that they were full of honey. So when subsidence damaged one coffin about a hundred years ago, causing a liquid to trickle out at the seam, the workman repairing the church seized the oppertunity to prove the legend. He ran his finger along, then had a taste to confirm it was indeed honey.

we swoon like '50s housewives buzzing like a hive