FIFTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VIII. 561 



ness of the use of one's property may depend upon its situation, for 

 what might be lawful in one locality would prove intolerable in another. 

 The use of a building in the midst of a city densely populated for a 

 storage house for hardware would not be objectionable in the slightest 

 degree, while the use of the same building for the storage of gunpowder 

 or other high explosives could not be permitted. 



The common law, proceeding from fixed principles of universal appli- 

 cation, and developing from the growth of civilization, has, in each 

 succeeding period, found ready adjustment to new subjects resulting 

 from the widening dominion of mankind over the creatures and forces 

 of nature, furnishing a ready remedy for every wrongful encroachment 

 of one upon the rights of another. In the times of the early law writers 

 bees were most generally known as they existed in their original state. 

 Hence they were called — jerae naturae — and classed as wild animals. 

 A property right, or at least a qualified property right, in them could be 

 acquired by capture which, in accord with the general rule concerning 

 wild animals, existed so long as the captor could hold them in posses- 

 sion. A distinction seems always to have been made between the pos- 

 session of animals ferocious and those of gentler dispositions, and it 

 was an indictable as a nuisance to permit an animal of known mischiev- 

 ous disposition to go at large. Bees, however, seem never to have been 

 regarded as ferocious or as likely to do injury to persons or property, 

 and in the far greater number of instances in which they have been the 

 subject of judicial consideration the questions at issue have concerned 

 the property interests in them. It is doubtful now, however, if any 

 court would denominate them as wild animals, in view of the present 

 general state of development of the industry of honey production and 

 the numerous instances of State legislation designed to promote and 

 protect the breeding and rearing of bees for that purpose. In the one 

 or two cases decided in American jurisdictions in which the question 

 has been presented, it has been determined, in accordance with the rule 

 above referred to, that the keeping of bees, even in large numbers and 

 in towns and villages, is not a nuisance per se. 



But greater interest, perhaps, centers in the question of whether or 

 not bees may be so kept as to constitute a private nuisance, and also 

 whether municipal corporations, as cities and towns, may restrain or 

 prohibit their presence within the corporate limits. In answering the 

 first proposition, it must be borne in mind that persons who dwell in 

 urban communities must of necessity submit to such restrictions upon 

 their absolute liberties that the dwelling of other persons therein shall 

 be tolerable. As it is the unreasonable or unwarrantable use of oRe's 

 premises or property, otherwise lawful, that contributes an essential 

 element of a nuisance, a first inquiry in any case would be directed to 

 this point of reasonableness of the use or occupation, and in determin- 

 ing this all of the surrounding facts and circumstances would enter into 

 the consideration. The presence of one colony at a given point might 

 be perfectly consistent with the due observance of the rights of the own- 

 er of the next lot, while a colony stationed at another point within the 

 same distance would be obnoxious to the law. Again, one colony at a 

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