BEES

At some point the vice chairman of Hurworth Parish Council asked the opinion of the recently retired Director of Development and Environment for Darlington Borough Council his view.

Over the course of several emails between the two, which I acquired under the Freedom of Information legislation, the reply to the vice chair from this well qualified person speaks volumes when he says: “I think that a risk assessment to compare bee keeping on the allotments with chickens would show bee keeping to be considerably higher risk than keeping chickens, but keeping chickens was banned by Hurworth Parish Council because of possible nuisance... something of a red herring.”

He goes on to talk about a recent Hurworth victim of anaphylactic shock and says: “I have now changed my mind in the light of the above and no longer support the keeping of bees in any public area or on the allotments at Strait Lane.

“The addition of a hive or two will make not one jot of difference to the survival of the honey bee population so I am not going to change my view.”

Funny how the pro-bee lobbyists seem to have buried this response, no doubt until a favourable one from someone else eventually comes in for them to bandy about publicly.

I White, Hurworth.