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Mailbag: Bee boxes are ‘lawsuit waiting to happen’

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I reside in Landmark, which is a Huntington Beach condominium community for seniors. The Woodshop Club in our community has made wooden boxes in which to raise bees and places those boxes on top of sheds located in our RV parking lot.

The sheds are for storage of gardening and other equipment. Workers go in and out frequently and some have been stung.

The Woodshop Club subsequently harvests the honey and bottles it for sale. That all takes place in the parking lot.

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A number of residents have been stung. We are seniors, many with diminished immune systems. Some are allergic to bee stings, which can be life-threatening. Our board of directors is reluctant to act because the board consists of seven members and at least two are strong supporters of the beehive project.

The current situation here is unacceptable. As one person put it, “It is a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

Helen Levin

Huntington Beach

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How to save the honeybees

Keeping bees in residential neighborhoods is obviously controversial, but there is no question that we must save honeybees because they are vital to the propagation of a long list of fruits and vegetables, among them apples, almonds, avocados, broccoli, blueberries, cherries and watermelons.

There’s something that all of us can do: Buy organic fruits and vegetables. Only if more consumers are willing to buy organic produce will it be profitable for large numbers of farmers and growers to abandon pesticides.

Do it for the bees, your eating enjoyment, farm workers’ health, clean water and just maybe for your own health. Who wants to eat pesticides anyway?

Jill Krum

Huntington Beach

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Golf club: perks and miseries

I am one of the privileged few to live adjacent to the Meadowlark Golf Club in Huntington Beach. It is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, our neighbors are wonderful people, and the golf course can be positively idyllic at night and in the morning.

On the other hand, the golf course has, well, golfers. The great majority of the golfers who play at the club are fine people who are courteous and content to concentrate on their game.

However, an annoying minority are rude boors who swear at the top of their lungs and ignore the rules for keeping their carts on or near the cart paths. This behavior would be more bearable if many of these so-called sportsmen were also not getting drunk and urinating on trees and walls around the course.

This misbehavior occurs frequently enough that some of the owners of homes that border the golf club have put up signs asking golfers not to use their property as a urinal. These signs do not act as an effective deterrent. The questionable golfers appear to use any tree or wall they choose at the moment.

Calls to the clubhouse are dismissed with, “We’ll take care of it.” But if anything is being done, we who alert them are not told. Moreover, the golf club makes a point of driving beer out to the golfers regardless of their current state of inebriation.

The administration of the Meadowlark Golf Club can and should do more to curb the public drunkenness and public urination that pollutes this public golf course. Those responsible should also learn how to be good neighbors to those of us who border the course.

Brad DeFord

Huntington Beach

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