{"id":56272,"date":"2024-04-02T16:45:15","date_gmt":"2024-04-02T16:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com"},"modified":"2024-04-02T17:08:28","modified_gmt":"2024-04-02T17:08:28","slug":"the-rise-of-the-bee-bandits","status":"publish","type":"wpm-article","link":"https:\/\/www.noemamag.com\/the-rise-of-the-bee-bandits","title":{"rendered":"The Rise Of The Bee Bandits"},"content":{"rendered":"

The foundational story of the modern American West is riven with tales of animals slaughtered or plundered: bison gunned down by the million, wolves cast out, horses purloined, cattle rustled. Today, a rather different flavor of animal crime has become ascendent \u2014 the theft of bees.<\/p>

Every year, the bloom of thousands of almond trees in California spurs one of the world\u2019s largest, albeit artificial, migrations<\/a> of animals; as billions of honeybees are loaded onto trucks and sent to deliver lucrative pollination fees for their human keepers. This insect odyssey ensures paydays for often struggling beekeepers, the production of most of the world\u2019s almonds, and increasingly, an opportunity for enterprising thieves.<\/p>

Standing in the way of the bee rustlers \u2014 often alone \u2014 is Rowdy Freeman, a deputy at the Butte County Sheriff\u2019s Office in California\u2019s Central Valley. Freeman is a steely sort of bee detective. Angular, with a shaved head and fond of wearing wrap-around sunglasses, the taciturn deputy is a beekeeper himself and is aghast at how hive thefts have become so ubiquitous.<\/p>

Last year, according to Freeman calculations, a record<\/a> of more than 2,300 honeybee hives were stolen in the Central Valley. This year\u2019s thefts could easily surpass that number, with Freeman recording nearly 2,000 hives stolen already. Despite the growing scale of this crime, Freeman is typically the only law enforcement officer working with beekeepers to track the stolen hives and their thieves.<\/p>

\u201cI\u2019m trying to get more help for this because it\u2019s become a major problem, it\u2019s getting out of control,\u201d Freeman said. While California has state branches devoted to stamping out the theft of horses or cattle, no such task force exists for bees, he notes with no small amount of envy and frustration. The federal government is also uninterested in the issue, despite what Freeman describes as clear-cut evidence that stolen hives have been transported over state lines.<\/p>

\u201cIt\u2019s just me,\u201d he said. \u201cThe state of California has done nothing to help.\u201d<\/p>

The Honeybee Era<\/h2>

Horses and cattle may be the antecedents to bees in terms of human thievery, but the scale involved here is very different. Farmers have carpeted huge swathes of prime Central Valley land with serried ranks of almond trees. The annual budding of this sought-after nut and its burgeoning pollination needs means up to roughly nine out of every 10 commercial honeybee hives must be sent here from all corners<\/a> of the U.S.<\/p>

For some time at the start of each year, the Central Valley becomes a sort of giant, mechanized jamboree of honeybees, with 18-wheelers<\/a> and semis bearing several million hives traversing this monoculture and depositing their cargo in orchards to propagate the crop. We are accustomed to aggregating sheep and cows and, to a lesser degree at home, our cats and dogs. But in terms of the sheer numbers<\/a> \u2014 2.7 million hives, according to Wenger, or a lowball estimate of some 54 billion bees to support this year\u2019s almond crop \u2014 there is little to compare to the annual seething mass of bees clustered in California outside of enthralling wild scenes like the African migration<\/a> of wildebeest. <\/p>

\u201cIt makes you think you\u2019re reading an old western about moving 7,000 head of cattle across the high plains,\u201d said Jacob Wenger, an entomologist at California State University, Fresno. \u201cBut even then, it wasn\u2019t 90% of all the beef cattle in the United States.\u201d<\/p>

Despite the numbers of hives involved and the lucrative fees beekeepers can now charge growers for their tiny winged contractors, security around this enterprise is usually fairly lax. Hives are trucked in, often by third-party crews, and unloaded in orchards or holding lots that are rarely gated, fenced or guarded, and easily visible from the road. <\/p>

Amid the frenzy of this seasonal activity, semi-trucks will sometimes load or unload hives in the dead of night. Given Central Valley farmland’s sprawling, horizon-busting nature, a visitor might not even be seen at all. In such conditions, a truck, a smattering of local knowledge and opportunism is all that\u2019s needed to spirit away tens of thousands of dollars of humming property.<\/p>

In January, Victor Lazo, who has kept bees in the Houston area for the past decade, sent around 4,000 colonies to the Central Valley for almond season. After the truck crew dropped off the hives in an orchard, Lazo arrived to feed them and treat them for any disease; to his shock, he discovered a whole row \u2014 168 hives in all \u2014 had vanished<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

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\n “While California has state branches devoted to stamping out the theft of horses or cattle, no such task force exists for bees.” <\/div>\n\n \n