With no judgment on how you and yours may be planning to spend this Independence Day, I share the following, a story of drunken bees and Prohibition.

If bees gather juices from over-ripe fruit or the fermenting mash of moonshiners, they may fly impaired.

A few times during Prohibition, this led revenuers straight to the moonshiners’ stills. Recognizing this, in 1930, a police department in Wichita, Kansas, added a bee colony to its law enforcement equipment. The stories here are too brief to say whether the detectives mastered some reverse form of beelining to find the stills.

Newspapers had fun with this tale, and it was reported as far away as Tasmania, Australia (where there was no prohibition).