A beekeeper has been jailed for six months after she set swarms of her insects on sheriff’s deputies attempting to carry out an eviction at a friend’s house.

Rebecca Woods insisted she only released her truckload of hives to allow the bees to enjoy the “lovely, flowering landscape” near the home of an elderly friend and cancer patient.

But a district court in Springfield, Massachusetts, heard that Woods, 59, admitted under questioning that she was trying to save him from eviction by freeing the bees in the presence of the deputies who had shown up to serve papers.

Several officers were stung on their heads and faces, and one required hospital treatment, the New York Times reported.

Additionally, about a thousand of Woods’s bees died during the encounter, many of them crushed when several hives toppled as she wrestled with deputies trying to arrest her, and others because female honeybees die after delivering their sting.

“This was unlike anything our team has ever experienced,” Nick Cocchi, the Hampden county sheriff, said of the incident, which was captured on video released by his office and posted to YouTube by MassLive.

In the footage, several deputies are heard shouting “hey” at Woods, and one says: “She’s opening the bees!”

One deputy is seen frantically waving his arms, trying to shoo the insects away.

Woods, who put on her beekeeper’s suit during the incident, had driven up to the property with the hives stacked on a trailer pulled by her blue SUV, and proceeded to lift the lids of a number of them. During an ensuing tussle, she was thrown to the ground by two deputies and arrested as a large swarm of bees flew around the property’s front yard.

The court heard that Woods was told during the encounter that some deputies were allergic to bees, and that she replied: “Oh, you’re allergic? Good!”

Mary Saldarelli, Woods’s lawyer, told the Times that her client’s words were “a reaction to having your face put down in the pavement and being shoved there and kept there”.

Her reason for going to the property, Saldarelli added, was that Woods had experienced several evictions herself and wanted to protect people from predatory lenders who charged extortionate rates on non-mainstream mortgages.

Her friend was a man in his 80s who was undergoing cancer treatment, she said, and had gone to a local library to see about filing a motion to halt the eviction, while Woods drove the bees to his house.

“It really was just a sincere hope that he would not suffer the humiliation and devastation of going through an eviction, of losing your home,” Saldarelli said.

According to the Times, a jury acquitted Woods of seven felonies but convicted her guilty of four misdemeanor counts of assault and battery and two counts of reckless assault.

Saldarelli said her client would serve about another two weeks in jail because she had been held without bail since her arrest at a motel room in Tennessee and during a lengthy extradition process to Massachusetts.

Woods, she said, maintained her innocence and has filed an appeal. “So she is not acquiescing in any way, shape or form,” the lawyer said.

Her friend, meanwhile, lost his home in Longmeadow, about five miles south of Springfield. Woods “ultimately failed in her attempt to stop the eviction, which is a matter determined by the courts, not the sheriff’s office”, Cocchi said in a statement.

He added: “We don’t just show up to enforce an order. We try to help people through difficult situations. That commitment doesn’t change, even in the face of something like this.”