Thursday, February 26, 2015

Bee Rustling?!

26 February 2015

BEE RUSTLING!?

            Bee Rustling?  Recent events have drawn a lot of attention to the crime of bee rustling.  But, when most first hear about bee rustling . . . well, let’s just say that this crime seems to spring up out “out of left field.” Rustling is the theft of livestock.  And honeybees are, legally, treated like livestock in many jurisdictions.  Sometimes "rustling" is used to describe the theft of hives with the bees inside.  Then, "theft" is used to describe removing the bees from the hive and carrying them off.  But there's no real consistency in the names given to the crimes.

            Live-stock rustling is old . . . very old and, apparently, common to almost every culture on earth.  Rustling isn’t hard to understand.  A person’s or community’s livestock are a valuable resource.  Cattle are raised for meat and dairy products as well as providing leather for clothing.   Sheep are also raised for their meat, but provide wool for cloth and clothing.  Even ostriches are raised for their feathers (factoid: these very large birds can be repeatedly sheered for their feathers like sheep are sheered for wool).

HOW, EXACTLY, DO BEES GET “RUSTLED”?

            Actually, there are two ways to rustle by honeybees.  The first can involve nothing more than pulling up in a truck and taking some standing hives.  Beehives must be kept in the open for the benefit of the activities of their insect occupants (pollination and honey-making).  Taking whole hives to another location is about the fastest way to do the crime.

            But there’s another, more complicated but, surprisingly, popular way to do the crime and conceal your doings at the same time.  If you don’t want the theft detected, you open the hive and remove the “valuable” parts and leave the rest behind.  

           What are the valuable parts?  (1) The queen – the mother of every bee in the hive . . .  and . . . (2) the brood comb.  The brood comb is the nursery housing the next generation of worker bees and queens.  After you've taken the queen and brood comb, you can leave the rest behind and re-close the hive.  Weeks may pass before anyone will be able to tell that the colony is dying.

            But doesn't the bee-rustler want to take the honey?  

           Actually, no.  The bees will make more of that quickly enough.  And rustlers often aren’t after honey-money anyway.

HOW TO GET RICH KEEPING BEES

            The best way to understand bee rustling is to remember exactly what ranchers hope to gain by raising livestock.

            Money.

            But is there that much money in honey?

            The answer to that question is, most often, “no.”  But most of the money in modern commercial beekeeping isn’t from honey anymore.  About 40 years ago, a beekeeper might ask local farmers to allow hives to be placed near their farms’ crops.  Sometimes, beekeepers were even forced to pay farmers to allow pollinating honeybees near a farm’s crops.  After all, the bees would use the pollen to make honey.  What could the farmer expect to get out the deal?

            Fast-forward 40 years.

            Bees are in short supply in agriculture.  Particularly large farm operations are absolutely dependent on their crops producing seed for the next season.  Even more significantly, without pollination, many plants and trees won’t produce fruit at all.  And fruit production is very profitable. 

            But there are also nuts.  The nut is called the almond, one of America’s most profitable cash crops.  Without bees, few almonds would be produced.  Problem?  Bees are in short supply and almond growers need pollinators.

FARMING CHANGED

            We hear a lot today about declining bee populations in North America and Europe.  But, surprisingly, the pollinator shortage wasn’t caused by declining populations -- at least not in the beginning.  Instead, agricultural operations, the farms, grew in size and, then, grew and grew and grew some more.  The profitability of almond production rose so much that California’s almond orchards have grown from thousands to millions of acres in just a few decades. 

             Even before honeybee populations began to decline, the growth of agriculture outpaced the growth of honeybee populations.  So, in the beginning, the bees weren’t dying, the farms were growing.  Only, later, did bee populations begin to decline.

             Considering the growth of agricultural demand, the news that honeybee population were declining was met with tremendous concern by growers.  Admittedly, the growers' view of "shortage" is a bit different that the naturalists' view.  To the growers, declining bee population, mean expense.  The fewer bees, the more it costs growers to lease the services of those available.  To date, there remain enough bees to go around, but as bee populations move downward, the price of renting the bees goes up.  Of course, commercial beekeepers are getting "the long end of stick," as individual hive rental prices climb higher and higher.
  
BEEKEEPING BECOMES BIG MONEY

            Beekeeping “old timers” will speak of the days when it was struggle just to keep body and soul together in the beekeeping business.  There’s always been a healthy demand for honey, but not so much profit that beekeeping didn’t have its good times and bad.

            Now, almost every commercial beekeeper in the United States leases their bees out as “pollinators.”  And almost every commercial beekeeper in America will visit the almond orchards of California this spring – as they have for many springs past.  How much can you make per hive.  Well, you can get paid $200.00 for rental of one hive for just a few days.  And, when the smoke clears, you’ll likely have made almost $100.00 profit over and above all your costs.  

            Oh, there's something else.  . . .   How many hives does a single beekeeper bring to the almond orchards in the spring?  The larger operators bring 10,000 to 20,000 hives.  We’re not just talking serious money.  We’re talking serious net profit.

HOW TO MAKE EVEN MORE FROM EACH HIVE

            But wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have any costs.  If the $200 rental fee per hive went right into you pocket without any investment of time, materials and effort.  It’s a nice dream.  Money for nothing.

            Well, honeybee rustlers have found a way to make that dream a reality.  Let the beekeeper/owner of the hive bear the costs.  All the rustler has to do is hit the road in January of each year (just before the almond pollination season).  Troll the areas around the almond fields.  No one can watch all those hives every minute of the day and night.  When no one’s looking, just pick up a few (or a lot of) hives. 

            Spring in the almond fields is a wild time with growers and beekeepers trying to connect during a short season.  There will be short-falls when some expected bees fail to arrive.  Filling those unexpected gaps isn’t just a good market, it’s a great one.  At the last minute, a rustler may be able to rent their stolen hives out for more than the average market price.  And the rustlers don’t even have to come back to pick the hives up.  They can just take the money and run.

BIG MONEY ATTRACTS ATTENTION

            If you understand beekeeping and bee behavior, this sort of rustling can be easy.  But to pull off this “steal and lease” operation you have to stick with the “quick” type of theft.  You take the whole hive.  You can’t pause to take parts of the hive, install them in your own hives and wait for them to mature.

            The problem with stealing the whole hives, for the rustler, is that it increases the chances of getting caught.  Most hives have names branded into the wood and serial numbers attached.  The serial numbers are assigned by beekeepers as a group working through their own association.  But even with these identifiers,  bee rustlers do just what auto thieves do.  They file off the brands and numbers.  Still, they may get caught in the process or the hives may be recognized by color or design.  

            A government sponsored national registration system for hives might help.  But all the added record keeping will only help recovery, not prevent theft.  A GPS solution has been proposed with a system sensitive enough to detect the relatively small surface movements that a bee rustler might make in stealing and leasing a hive to an unsuspecting grower.  But these distances are small enough that a sensitive system is required.  The needed GPS units are really too big to be conveniently installed in your average hive.  And, when you’re dealing with hives numbering in the thousands, GPS units become too expensive.

            For now, business is profitable enough, and rustling limited enough, to allow most beekeepers to absorb rustling loses.  But as farms expand and bee populations decline, the rental value of each hive increases.  And every increase in value adds to profits -- on the "up" side.  But there's also a "down" side.  Each hive becomes more tempting to bee rustlers .
  
            Unfortunately, honeybee rustling is a crime that seems to have a future.  With the agricultural industry  constantly increasing in size and bee populations steadily decreasing, the value of honeybees as pollinators isn’t expected to decline any time soon.  





 

Thursday, February 19, 2015

“The Jesse James of the Bee Hive Industry”?

19 February 2015 

'Time was, when beekeeping was a pretty tame way to make a living.  Getting stung by your own bees was your biggest worry.  After that, if your bee-yard (apiary) was in the northern or western U.S., honey bears could be a problem.  But if you could deal with these dangers, beekeeping was, otherwise, smooth sailing.  

After all, beekeeping always had its good and bad times, but there were no roaming outlaws to worry about.  It wasn't like the old west.  There were no criminals who prayed on beekeepers like Jesse James once prayed on railroads.

But, to hear some tell it, times may be "a-changin'."

David Allred became the first person to ever be convicted of bee theft in the state of California. The Los Angeles Times reported that, at his 1977 sentencing hearing. Allred said that he wanted to be remembered as the “Jesse James of the bee hive industry.”

By the way, Allred denies having ever said any such thing. But I’d deny it too, if I were being sued for damages resulting from another bee theft.  How did Jesse’s . . . er . . . I mean . . . Allred’s sentencing hearing come out? Well, according to him, he was freed. According to the state of California, Allred was sentenced to three years in prison.

Whether or not Allred expressed a wish to be remembered as the Jesse James of beekeeping, he scored another first by being the first person ever sent to prison for “bee-rustling” in the state of California.  But bee-rustling wasn’t the only crime with which Allred was charged.

Together with fellow beekeeper David Graves, Allred marched into the history books, again, as the greatest proven mass-murderer of bees in all of honeybee history. Using cyanide gas, Allred and Graves sent 15 million of a neighboring beekeeper’s bees “to the promised land.”

The court found that Graves was unhappy after the victim beekeeper married Graves’ ex-wife.  So, with the assistance of Allred, Graves retaliated by killing the victim’s bees. There are no laws against killing bees -- and this must seem like a big legal loophole . . . especially if you're a honeybee!  But there are laws against killing your beekeeping neighbor’s bees.

The charge was vandalism. 

The court apparently didn’t believe Allred’s alibi. He testified that he couldn’t have committed the crime because, at the time, he was alone in an orchard with a 16-year-old girl playing strip poker. (I did stop to seriouly consider his“excuse” . . .  because . . . well . . .  if I were going to “make-up” an alibi, I could sure do better than that.)  Allred says his conviction was overturned on appeal. But, again, the state of California disagrees reporting that Allred entered prison in 1977 and was only released in 1983.

Now, Allred has been accused of another bee theft. Is he modestly asserting his innocence? Has he mellowed with age -- chastened by his prison terms and contrite over his misspent youth as a notorious bee-napper and killer?

Not at all.

In fact, Allred says, in so many words, that he’s tired of being "persecuted.” In fact, he has announced, more or less, that he won’t be “Mr. Nice Guy” anymore!  Allred says he “won't deal with the law again.” He claims a judge told him that “[w]hen the legal system fails you,” and your property is taken, “it's your right as an American citizen to take it back yourself.'"

Kind of makes you shudder . . . doesn't it?








Read more about the David Allred Story: “Take the Honey and Run












The Mystery of the Moondance Bee-Napping

19 February 2015

A "wave" of bee-napping (or is it bee rustling?) struck Alberta, Canada in May of 2012. Moondance Honey owner Bill Termeer has, or had, about 3,000 colonies in Alberta. In May of 2012, his employees noticed some hives were missing. The final count came to 154 missing hives and about 3 million bees. The losses translate into cash – about $60,000.

According to Rodrigo Mendez of the Alberta Beekeepers Association, bears are usually the greatest danger to hives. Termeer himself is now adding parasites, diseases, and “winter kill” to the list. None of these are threatening Termeer’s own bees. Instead, he believes these threats have killed some of his neighbor’s bees. And some “neighbor” is helping himself or herself to some of Moondance’s honeybees and hives.

Honeybees don’t exactly hibernate during the winter, but do retire to their hives and live off of the hive’s stored food -- honey and pollen. Parasites, like the verroah mite can infect honeybees with disease. And disease can thrive and spread even in warm, but overly-damp, hives during the winter months. This can cause a lot of bee deaths. In fact, this is, often, the cause of what beekeepers call “winter kill.”

But, whatever the reason for this crime, the thief is not impulsive but, instead, a careful planner. Some of Termeer’s hives have been opened and the bees removed. Each hive must have one queen. But Termeer has discovered hive after hive with missing queens. And that is serious. Queens must be replaced if the hive is to survive. But queens and workers aren’t the only thing missing.

Someone has taken the “brood combs” out of his hives. Brood combs are where the queen lays her eggs and workers tend to, and nurture, young bees. The brood comb theft is especially elaborate because the thief actually opened the hive and removed the wooden frames in which the bees built the brood combs. Then, the bee-napper replaced the brood comb frames with “other” frames containing “starter” combs, but no brood.

The discovery of the strange frames was the final tip-off that this was a theft -- a well planned and careful one. Tremeer has made a video, “Bee Theft 001,” to demonstrate how this stealthier kind of theft looks.

We can only breathe a sigh of relief and be glad that bee-napping isn’t a major criminal industry.  But wait, you'd better not hold your breath . . . . 









In "Bee Theft 001," Bill Tremeer demonstrates explains what bee-theft looks like:



Thursday, February 12, 2015

“Green” Bees Reclaim Strip Mine Lands

12 January 2015



            First, bees are yellow and black.  After all, those are the universal “honeybee” colors.  When I talk about “green” bees, I don’t mean that the bees are colored green.  I mean that these honeybees are doing so-called “green” activities.   In this case, the honeybees are reclaiming land badly damaged by strip mining. 

            The type of coal mining called strip mining doesn’t involve the familiar coal shaft. Instead, in strip mining, the top layer of a rather large area of land sheered off.  Then, a second layer is sheered.  The surface hole becomes deeper and deeper with each new layer removed.

            Because each sheer “strips” a slightly smaller area of land than the last, the edges of the resulting hole look a bit like giant stair steps.  The result is a giant unnatural valley, sometimes, with a “pond” forming in the very bottom of the hole.  The sides of the hole have been sheered to rock, so there is no soil to support growth of anything after the mine hole is abandoned.


 Strip Mine Spoil

            Strip mining leaves the surface of the land in such an ugly condition that it even earned the name “spoil.”  So, a “strip mine spoil” is a giant depression, with solid rock walls, left after the mining operation is finished.

            Federal law requires that strip mining companies restore the land to its previous condition. But this requirement is deceptive in the sense that really no restoration project could ever accomplish that goal. 

            What can be done is to fill the spoil with earth and plant a variety of wild plants and flowers.  Nature itself must take the surface through several stages of development before you could honestly say that the land was “restored” to its former glory.  This is the slow way.

            One way around the long wait is to “restore” and land by introducing a “higher use” such as building a golf course, airport, or prison on the “restored” surface.  But, even if these “higher uses” are good shortcuts to “restoration,” the natural and aesthetic value of the land is lost.

            But let’s go back to the first way to restore the land . . .  the slow way.   Wild flowers planted on the restored surface will produce new seed.  With each passing year, the land will become more densely covered with flowers and grasses.  As the years pass, the dense surface growth provides natural compost with trees slowing growing to significant heights throughout the area.               

            One thing wild plant life can always use is pollinators.  You need the natural plant life to produce as much fertile seed as possible.   You can’t really get the fertile seed without some pollinating honeybees.  In fact, introducing bees into the equation always seemed like a good idea.  But, soon, other uses for the bees became apparent.

            What other uses?

            Beekeeping on the reclaimed surface land seemed necessary to provide enough pollinators to assure the greatest seed production for the following year.  Mining companies, in both West Virginia and Kentucky, with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, helped beekeepers establish beeyards on the reclaimed surfaces. 



            But the Pritchard Mining Company of Hernshaw, West Virginia has gone farther and “diversified” -- adding beekeeping and honey production to its list of business activities along with its long-established mining operations.  Honey production has been strong.  There is still plenty of room to expand by adding more hives and beekeepers.   Of course, as Wade Stillner of the Department of Agriculture explains, the program has its enemies.  But these are only natural enemies like the iconic honey bear.

            The State of Kentucky developed a formula to be applied by the “Coal Country Beeworks Program.”  The program used partnerships with coal companies and direct grants to place commercial beehives at five mining sites in Kentucky. 

            West Virginia has even bigger goals for their project.  The state plans to introduce beekeeping training for veterans and out-of-work coal miners.  And, with the installation of more hives, the state hopes it will be able to provide honey for its schools. 

            And how are the honeybees handling all this?  I can only imagine their delight in the wide open spaces available on the reclaimed land.  A large area, thick with wild flowers and grasses, may irritate me as I try to step through it -- without stumbling or falling.  But, to the honeybees, that same field is an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of goodies. 

            These days, honeybees live in beeyards at our airports and enjoy luxury accommodations at many of the finest hotels, not just in America, but throughout Europe.  Urban and suburban residents are taking up amateur beekeeping.  And, now, the bees have gone “green” using their natural skills to assist in reclaiming partially restored strip mine spoils. 

            So, in spite of all of the honeybees’ current problems with disease and declining populations, the future seems much more hopeful.   As so many sympathetic souls have joined in a direct effort to raise bee populations, we’re learning that, in each case, these same bees have something valuable to give us in return.


About the Author











 

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Part III - “The [Honeybee] Gangs of New York”

5 February 2015

[Humor]


In Part 1 of this series, we examined the strange case of a group of honeybees that swarmed the White House. These bees didn’t march or gather in the streets.  Instead they “occupied” a bush in a strange foreshadowing of tactics used in the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations soon to come.  A connection?  No one knows.  The White House bees were, apparently, captured, but their fate remains unknown. 
In Part 2, a short time after the bees had “occupied” a bush on the White House lawn, a swarm of bees descended on Wall Street.  An innocent frolic or determined protest?  Who can say?  These bees were captured quietly.  Later, it was revealed that the entire swarm had moved to Connecticut. All honeybee swarms are homeless, so the move to pricey Connecticut raised questions.    

And . . . these and other questions remain unanswered.

THE NEXT CHAPTER

All of the relocated “Wall Street bees” have remained curiously silent after their sudden move to the affluent, country club laden, hills of Connecticut.  But, then, only a short time later, the bees reappeared in the Big Apple.  But they didn’t arrive as a homeless swarm.  Instead, they appeared as seasonal guests in some of New York’s finest Hotels.  That takes more than “honey-money.”  Funny how the fortunes of these bees suddenly changed after their attack on Wall Street? 

Maybe the sight of their idle, wealthy sisters mingling in the high society of New York’s hotel scene, stirred up the swarms of poor, homeless bees still roaming the mean streets of the city.  But, shortly after the much publicized “Occupy Movement first appeared in the Big Apple, in 2011, New York exploded in a wave of honeybee gang-related violence.  .

WERE RELAXED IMMIGRATION LAWS TO BLAME?

Some blame the mid-2010 change in the city’s beekeeping laws.  Laws prohibiting beekeeping in the city were repealed. Some argue that, without hives and colonies, there could be no swarms.  But with legalized beekeeping, honeybee colonies migrated to the city in record numbers.

The migrations were spontaneous and unplanned.  Without sufficient housing to accommodate the immigrants, swarms of honeybees began to roam the city’s streets  When a swarm descended on the Wall Street restaurant, “Cipriani Wall Street,” (either to catch an expensive lunch or occupy the high-end restaurant in protest), the insects were nabbed by the NYPD beekeeper’s low-pressure vacuum.  The “swarm” was, quickly and quietly, over.

DOES NEW YORK CITY REWARD HONEYBEES FOR SWARMING?

Suspicion grew that swarming gangs of bees were being “paid off” to leave the city.  Then, the bees were relocated in, not just comfortable, but luxurious accommodations.  Critics charge that these pay-offs reward bees for swarming.  This has caused swarming incidents to increase just like any other activity would increase in response to a predictable reward.  Poor, homeless honeybees may see gang swarming as the only way to change their standard of living.

THE QUIET AND, THEN, THE STORM

After the Wall Street “incident,” there was a period of quiet.  But, as affluent bees began to appear in New York hotels, the street swarms exploded.

First, Little Italy was targeting by an angry swarm of honeybees.   Cleverly, the bees blocked the entrance to the Italian-American Museum at the corner of Mulberry and Grand Streets.  No one dared enter the museum as police were forced to close the sidewalk. (Well, actually, the museum was closed at the time)  The bees blocked the museum entrance by pretending to attack a U.S. Mailbox on the sidewalk outside   

Onlookers were terrified.   Mike Costabile, who works nearby, said, “It was pretty cool.” Finally, Little Italy’s bee violence Strike Force arrived in full riot gear.  The team’s single member, Elie Miodownik, of the New York City Beekeepers Association, was wearing a screened hat and full beekeeper’s gear.

It took almost 3 hours from the swarm’s first landing to capture all the bees.  Stubbornly, they refused to budge from the U.S. Mailbox.  Maybe the bees intended a protest against the Federal Government or were expressing dissatisfaction with their postal service.   The reason for the bee’s sudden attack has never been revealed.  Miodownik, however, speculated that the swarm had been defeated in a gang war in a nearby hive and ejected from the hive to wander the mean streets, homeless and angry. 

Next, a Washington Heights fire escape was attacked and occupied by an angry swarm of honey bees.

Then, a tree outside the high-end Bulgari store in Midtown New York was the object another honeybee gang’s fury.   

Finally, on Mott Street in Chinatown, police closed down a section of the block as a gang of angry and unruly honeybees attacked a streetlight between Bayard and Pell Streets.  A terrified crowd fled the scene.  Well, actually, no one fled the scene.  Instead, more people gathered to take pictures of the bees.  But the crowd should have fled in fear.

This time NYPD beekeeper, Officer Tony Planakis, was called to the scene.  Assisted by Andrew Cote, of the New York City Beekeepers Association, the Mott Street swarm was finally brought under control.  Cote speculated that this was part of the same gang that had caused a disturbance on Hester Street earlier that same day.  But, then, Cote went on to drop a hint about a planned move to Connecticut for these bees.

Connecticut?!  If you keep rewarding bees with an upscale lifestyle in Connecticut, they will just continue to swarm!  But, no matter, maybe the bees have something to swarm about.  Cote went on to say that with honeybees allowed in the city, urban beekeeping and novice practitioners taking poor care of their hives were likely responsible for the repeated swarms. 

Translation:  Urban honeybee slumlords were providing overpriced, under-code, hives to these poor honeybee immigrants.  Force to live in these squalid conditions, the angry bees may just be trying to attract public attention to their plight!