RF - "Years ago, I made the error of selling honey to a small chain of retail
gourmet food stores..."

Here's my encounter with regulators...

A year or so ago, a friend of mine spotted a beautiful colony of honey bees hanging from a cottonwood branch about twenty feet above the ground. It had five or six drawn combs about a foot in diameter covered with bees. The tree was at a public place I will not mention, that was under the jurisdiction of a government entity that I will not name.

My friend thought there might be some risk to the over-curious or malicious public (and he was eager to capture a strong remote feral colony!), so he asked an acquaintance who worked at the facility if we could remove the bees. The answer was “Sure. I don’t see why not.”

As we made plans for the high, tricky removal, I thought I would cover all the bases ahead of time and called to see if we could drive our pick-up to the tree in question. (First Mistake) The fellow who answered the phone said “Bees. What bees? Where? I don’t know anything about any bees. I’ll have to check with My Supervisor.”

I got a call back from the fellow a few hours later instructing me to call The Biologist.

I called the The Biologist and mentioned all the good reasons to remove a colony from a well-traveled public space. I explained that honey bees were not an endangered species, so no problem there, but were, in fact, introduced to North America - that some folks even call them an invasive species. I said that samples of the bees would be sent off to determine their genetic lineage. I said the bees would almost certainly die over the winter anyway. I said we would leave the site undisturbed, but would neatly remove the branch the colony was hanging from.
The Biologist eventually said that while she could find no Official Policy regarding honey bees, she would check with Her Supervisor, and if he was willing to issue a Permit, she would approve it.

I then got a call from Her Supervisor saying that, while my request was unusual, if I would sign a permit we could go ahead and remove the errant bees. A day later I received an email from The Supervisor, with only the word “Attachment” in the subject line and nothing written in the text section. 

Attached was a Permit for, quote, “the removal of one cottonwood branch for science.”

No mention of those honey bees, who had no Official Policy of their own. No paper trail. A perfect CYA! The Bureaucrats all got off scot-free. The bees, however, were caught.

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