Every day, people come to a certain Reddit community after a conflict to get a sense of whether they were in the wrong or right on the mark in their side of the argument.
And honestly, it’s often not all that difficult to figure out who’s in the right, at least according to a given member’s version of the events. Most of the time, they were either made to feel bad for pushing back against what seemed like obviously unreasonable behavior or they lacked the self-awareness to understand why their actions were so painful to others.
But sometimes a situation is rough and complicated enough that it’s actually pretty hard to pick a side in an argument.
And in the case of one beekeeper’s dilemma, the debate became serious enough that the discussion had to be shut down entirely.
For the past six years, a man has kept bees in his backyard, which is located in a suburban neighborhood.
As he stressed in his Reddit post , his four hives are all legal and properly registered and he has obtained the appropriate insurance for them.
And while he largely considers his beekeeping a hobby, it has also provided him with a side income that helps to offset the thousands of dollars he’s spent on his setup.
Unfortunately, this hobby has brought him some complications in recent months after a new family moved in over the winter.
Although they apparently didn’t notice his hives until this past spring, they quickly became a grave concern for the family due to their son’s life-threatening allergy to bee stings.
The beekeeper said that this family was polite in asking him to remove his hives for their son’s sake but he didn’t see how he would be able to sustain the financial blow from doing so. So he refused.
But while the famaily didn’t press the issue further in person, the beekeeper suspects they were behind a Nextdoor post supposedly ranting about his hives.
Before long, the situation seemed to escalate further. In the beekeeper’s words, “Some of the bee hating Nextdoor people went to our town board and tried to get bee keeping outlawed in our town.”
This turned out to be unsuccessful and his hives would likely have been grandfathered in even if things ended differently, but the issue has clearly caused a rift between the neighbors.
As the beekeeper put it, “My neighbors and I aren’t really on speaking terms now.”
And it seems that Reddit was just as passionately split on the issue as the beekeeper’s neighborhood was.
That said, it seemed that at least a narrow majority of users took the beekeeper’s side, particularly in light of the efforts to get beekeeping banned in his town.
As one user said , “It wasn’t unreasonable of them to ask, nor were they the [expletive] until they started a rant on nextdoor and tried to legislate against your hobby/pets.
“You were there first. You didn’t move your hives, just winterized them. They were still in your yard.”
For another user, it was simply a complicated situation where neither party could be considered in the wrong.
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In their words , “This is just a series of unfortunate circumstances.”
Others, however, thought that the beekeeper was both callous and insensitive for keeping them despite knowing what could happen to his neighbor’s child.
As one of them put it , “That kid’s never gonna be able to leave his house without fear of hospitalization and I’d put money on his parents requiring supervision to enter his own backyard. Sucks for him. Also – just because you’re legally in the right doesn’t mean you’re morally in the right.”
This statement was also echoed by another beekeeper, who also wanted to debunk any claims that the hobbyist was helping vulnerable bee populations. This is because kept bees can and often do end up competing with wild bees for vital resources.
In their words , “I’m a beekeeper. Bees are awesome, and I love my hives. Just one question: How would you feel if your hobby killed a child?”
Unfortunately, it seemed that some users took their outrage far enough to actually send the beekeeper death threats, which led a moderator to block any further discussion of the matter.
Who do you think is in the right here?
h/t: Reddit | buzzilovebeesbuzz
