MASSACRE at FLOWERTOWN
MITCH YAWN KNEW something was wrong long before he got to the hives.
“I got a phone call. I was at work—working on an air conditioner. And she was—oh my God, she was just devastated,” he says.
“She” was Juanita Mae Stanley, Yawn’s then-fiancée and co-owner of the Flowertown Bee Farm in Dorchester County, South Carolina. Yawn and Stanley had started the farm a year earlier, with the goal of raising bees to sell to honey makers and hobbyists across the South. So far, they had 46 hives—a modest size, as bee farms go. That means Stanley and Yawn owned somewhere around 2.5 million bees.
On this muggy morning in August 2016, most of them were dead.
It was a firefighter who noticed the dead bees first. Piles of them littered the ground near the firehouse, not far from the meadow near the small lake where Yawn and Stanley had established their apiary. He called Stanley, who called Yawn after seeing the carnage.
“There were just dead bees everywhere,” Yawn recalls. “They were sweeping them up by the panful.”
The bees were dead because, according to court documents, the head of the county’s Mosquito Abatement Division, Clayton “Scott” Gaskins, had ordered a plane to spray deadly insecticides over portions of the county. Gaskins in turn had been directed by the state Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC), which had ordered the use of insecticides to target mosquitos that could be carrying the Zika virus, and by the Dorchester County Council, which had ordered the aerial spraying after Gaskins reported that trucks and ground-based crews could not access some of the DHEC’s target areas.
The spray killed the bees, and with them Yawn and Stanley’s nascent business.
It’s a pattern that is now familiar to all too many Americans: To stop the spread of a potentially deadly disease, government officials took sweeping actions that had direct and devastating consequences for small business owners.
When the couple demanded compensation from the county for the losses, the courts rejected their suit. The legal justification? The “police power” doctrine, which enjoys decades of judicial precedent.
Over the last hundred-odd years, police powers have been cited to justify intrusive state-based vaccination requirements and invoked to shield local governments from having to compensate homeowners whose property was destroyed by SWAT teams or flooded by the Army Corps of Engineers. In short, the doctrine gives states and localities vast authority to act in the name of public health, regardless of the consequences.
At the moment it happened, the killing of millions of bees at the Flowertown Bee Farm had nothing to do with COVID-19, which was still years away. But those same police powers provided the legal justification for lockdown orders imposed during the pandemic, including the closing of restaurants, stores, and other “nonessential” businesses for arbitrary lengths of time. Police powers are the reason the Flowertown bees died, the reason their owners
