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.
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