Landowners Must Exercise Reasonable Care to Avoid Injuring Honeybees

Anderson v. State of Minnesota, 2005 Minn. LEXIS 93 (Minn. March. 3, 2005).

Stephanie Showalter

Cases like this do not come along every day. The Supreme Court of Minnesota recently held that a landowner who knows honeybees are foraging on the property must exercise reasonable care in the application of pesticides. This case has no “salty” flavor (it wouldn’t even qualify as brackish), but we suspect you’ll forgive us this minor indulgence.

Background
Jeffrey Anderson and his fellow plaintiffs are migratory commercial beekeepers with hives located in several Minnesota counties. The beekeepers do not own the land upon which their hives are located; rather they have received permission from the landowners to use their property in exchange for money or honey. The hives are placed near groves of poplar trees, which are owned or managed by either the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) or International Paper (IP) for paper production and fuel research.

On July 21, 1999, the DNR arranged for a contractor to apply pesticides on a poplar plantation to combat a cottonwood leaf beetle infestation. The contractor used Sevin XLR Plus, a carbaryl-based pesticide toxic to bees. As a result of the spraying, some of the beekeepers’ bees died. The beekeepers sued DNR and IP for negligently creating an unreasonable risk of harm to the beekeeping operations, negligence per se for violating a Minnesota pesticide statute, and creating a private nuisance.

Duty Owed to Honeybees
The court begin its analysis by stating that in Minnesota “landowners owe a duty to use their property so as not to injure that of others.”1 It is not uncommon for landowners to be held responsible for damage caused when pesticides drift onto the property of others. The beekeepers’ bees, however, were not injured because pesticide drifted over the hives. The bees were harmed while foraging in the DNR and IP poplar groves. The two courts who had previously addressed this issue, the Wisconsin Supreme Court and the California Court of Appeals, refused to assign liability when bees, foraging on the land of another, came into contact with a pesticide because the bees were considered trespassers.2

The Minnesota Supreme Court reached a different conclusion. The court found that while landowners in Minnesota owe only a limited duty to trespassing livestock (refraining from willful or wanton negligence), “once the landowner discovers the trespassing animals’ presence, the landowner is ‘bound to use reasonable care to avoid injuring them.’”3 The beekeepers allege that DNR and IP intentionally sprayed pesticide in a plantation where they knew bees were foraging. The court determined that the beekeepers provided enough evidence of actual knowledge to survive summary judgment and proceed to trial. Specifically, the court stated “if, as the beekeepers allege, the DNR and IP had actual knowledge or were on notice of foraging honey bees, they may have come under a duty of reasonable care.”4

As for the beekeepers’ remaining claims, the court held that the beekeepers may have a valid negligence per se claim if the pesticide application was not consistent with the label directions (a violation of the Minnesota Pesticide Control Act). The court, however, dismissed the private nuisance claim because the beekeepers did not own the land upon which the hives were located and therefore lacked the required property interest.

Endnotes
1. Anderson v. State of Minnesota, 2005 Minn. LEXIS 93 at *5 (Minn. March. 3, 2005).
2. Id. at *7.
3. Id. at *8.
4. Id. at *8-9.