9 ms·

How to Steal 50M Bees

134 points by siberianbear 8y ago

Troncup1 8y ago
50M bees sounds dramatic but can be only one hive. Happens a lot in Australia too (another poster mentioned NZ). Example: https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/18-stolen-bee-hives-found-two-men-arrested/news-story/7ab58f82b19235beb5b1e46c7de821b4 https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/18-stolen-b...
mvidal01 8y ago
There's a few companies selling gps trackers for beehives. https://findmyhive.com/ https://findmyhive.com/ http://www.save-bees.com http://www.save-bees.com https://www.thebeecorp.com/qgps.html https://www.thebeecorp.com/qgps.html
njarboe 8y ago
I wonder if enough bees to pollinate the trees could survive on just being left alone in a almond orchard year round? The almond farms could have hives they leave in their orchards and don't extract the honey so the bees have lots of stored energy. This is the reason the bees make honey in the wild, a stored energy source. Hire a few bee keepers to keep an eye on things and fix problems. No moving around of diseases, stable source of bees, low cost? I know it is all the trend to outsource everything but bees seems pretty core to a fruit/nut tree operation.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  In theory this sounds great. So I wonder why it's not implemented? Perhaps it results in lower profits for bee keepers since they have to bring up more hives to service the same number of customers?
- TimTheTinker 8y ago
  Looks to me like the tradeoff is between hiring/paying local beekeepers to tend hives as needed year-round, or paying $200/hive to ship in hives from elsewhere during the flowering season. The latter probably ends up being less expensive, as long as there's enough supply.
- pakitan 8y ago
  It's too short of a season - few weeks. For the rest of the year, the bees will literally have nothing to forage on and when there is lack of forage, the queen will stop laying eggs, which will eventually lead to colony's death.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Almond trees produce no (or very little) nector. Older bees need that to live. Brood will eat pollen though. Googling images of almond orchards, they look like deserts. There is nothing else anywhere near so bees wouldn’t be able to forage anything else to sustain them. Given the look of the land, these orchards are watered, and that must be a massive problem also.
  - jimnotgym 8y ago
    But do they have to be deserts? Couldn't some kind of cover crop be useful both in terms of bee-feeding and in terms of reducing leeching of soil nutrients?
    - spraak 8y ago
      I think that's a great idea, but seems conflicting to the mindset that the almond farmers have (and most conventional farmers). That is, that's a more whole system mindset (see also permaculture) where farmers growing acres upon acres of just one crop (almonds, corn, soy) see it as discrete and disconnected from other crops and resources.
      - jimnotgym 8y ago
        In the EU farmers are paid to leave wildlife-strips and beetle-banks in their fields. The almond mono-culture I saw on the Netflix series mentioned was shocking to me. It looks like one big drought could turn it into a dust bowl! Land is almost never left as bare soil in Britain due to our wet climate. However before the EU paid for it, and rules were put in to stop removal of hedgerows, the UK was being carved into larger and larger fields of mono-culture cereals.
        spraak 8y ago
        Ah that's very interesting! You might find Bill Mollison's "Global Gardener" series interesting.
- Rotten194 8y ago
  No -- beehives rely on near-continuous nectar flow throughout spring and summer, and almonds don't produce enough for long enough to feed a hive.
Scaevolus 8y ago
If you're going to leave a bunch of $1500 hives in a field, wouldn't it make sense to hide trackers in some of them? Netflix's Rotten S01E01 covers much of the same material.
- HammadB 8y ago
  Rotten is such a fantastic docu-series. Are you aware of any other similar shows?
  - mikeyouse 8y ago
    Dirty Money is a similarly themed one about corruption -- the first season covered a great maple syrup heist, Allergan pharmaceuticals, a Payday loan criminal, HSBC's cartel connections, the VW NoX emissions scandal, and Trump's business career. https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100 https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100
    - cwyers 8y ago
      The maple syrup heist episode is amazing. I still can't believe that's real.
- burntrelish1273 8y ago
  Let's say the amortized cost of a GPS tracker is, conservatively/high-end with a lifetime data plan for updates every hour: $100. Let's say the cost of mean average deployment is $10. Then the break-even point for hive theft is reached if losses are well over 7.33 (bar) %. (110/1500) If losses are high, beekeepers will deploy them. If losses are low, deploying GPS would be more of a fear-based, emotional decision than a rational one.
  - golem14 8y ago
    Need only GPS trackers on a sample of the hives, no?
    - 8y ago
jxramos 8y ago
It's never a surprise about the fact that scoundrels find their way into what's lucrative. It's surprising to find out the many ways an economy can find lucrative endeavors.
- Troncup1 8y ago
  I think bee theft has happened in big cities like Chicago, Berlin and NYC beekeeping https://nycbeekeepers.blogspot.com/p/nyc-beekeeping-groups.html https://nycbeekeepers.blogspot.com/p/nyc-beekeeping-groups.h...
theologic 8y ago
I think this all changes in the nearish future. In my line of work, we sell an extraordinary amount of hard drives to surveillance companies. As an old timer, I've seen this "edge of the wedge" happen twice before, and it feels that it is happening again. I feel that surveillance seems to be equivalent to the PC in 1985 or Smartphones in 2003. In other words, in the same way that society and business was changed forever by the PC or Smartphones, crime will be changed forever by real world tracking. If you lived through PCs or Smartphones, we all said it would change the world, but I think very few (Alan Kay as a prime exception) really internalized the obvious future. The roadmap and growth of the commercial and consumer surveillance companies are absolutely extraordinary. And resolution x cameras x facial recognition = a future society where large things, such as packages in front of your door, bees in a field, or traffic accidents, will all be caught. Within a decade, in the same situation where somebody steals a hive of bees, the people that picked up the hives will almost guaranteed to have evidence from a camera on a face or license plate or vehicle type creating probable cause, so you can get the phone records and coordinates of not only the people that picked up the hives but where they dropped them off. I just think it is going to be much easier to catch bad behavior and ensure punishment. The real question to me is do we have a backlash against this similar to a GDPR? We see that laws are emerging to keep people from tracking us on the web. But will these types of laws be created so that we cannot track people in real life? If society determines that crime is so bad that we allow real world tracking, what happens to crime? Once you know that any physical act in the open will get you caught, does the crime rate drop dramatically except for those that wish to be caught? Do we have a new breed of off the grid criminal? Or a breed of super hacker criminal that evolves to beat the system. I think the most likely is that physical crime drops dramatically because everybody knows they will be caught. As an anime fan, there was program called Psycho-pass. The tenant of the show was a technology that was developed so that any crime would quickly be caught. In many ways a robust surveillance system is this fiction brought to life. One of the most interested arcs (spoilers) is when the system is broken, and the current society is completely unable to deal with the criminals because they have become so naive because the crime rate is so low. I can actually see something like that happening in the future just with a robust surveillance system if society allowed it to happen. Fun time to be alive, and I think we'll all see this story unfold in our life times.
sandworm101 8y ago
Can we get the bees to defend themselves? Like if you pick up a hive incorrectly it breaks open?
- kondro 8y ago
  Or spray dead bee pheromone on the thieves.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  They do have beekeeping gear.
chrisbennet 8y ago
It would only take a very few GPS locaters between multiple bee keepers to lead law enforcement to the “chop shop”. The bee keeper association could choose bee keepers randomly. If the same insurance company insures multiple bee keepers, it might benefit them to GPS a few of their customers.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  The amount of theft probably hasn't risen to that level yet. It's not so much the trackers, but who is going to track the trackers. They'd have to be on the case fast or risk the thieves removing the trackers.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Yes. Theft here in NZ has thieves specifically seeking out tracking systems (passive, like marked frames) scattering unwanted parts around paddocks and taking good frames only. Keep in mind that the honey frames have to be extracted, and these usually go to an extraction facility so they can notify people if suspicious. This happens frequently in NZ but our market would be far smaller. This part of the process is now requiring tracking here for quality control (quite how is a mystery to beekeepers) and do it wouldn’t be too hard to add a marker of ownership. Barcodes and QR codes are used on boxes and there is plenty of discussion about adding it to frames. It’s too late once the hives have been gone long like in the article. No one in their right mind would want them back as the disease risk is far too great. American foul brood is cured by burning the gear.
  - AngryData 8y ago
    I could see buying a bunch of cheap RFID tags and putting them in the frames. Drill a little hole, put it in, fill the rest with glue or epoxy so it is difficult to remove without obvious marks. They could just be a simple number progression that can be recorded in a log, nothing too fancy.
throwaway5752 8y ago
$2.5M USD? Is it still 5 bees for a quarter?
mlindner 8y ago
Those are the worst illustrations I've ever seen in an article. Just wow... https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/imm8kKJFsMQY/v1/-1x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/imm8kKJFsMQ...
ljw1001 8y ago
I love how-to articles, but I'm really hoping there will be a follow up that explains where to put the 50M bees after I've stolen them.
- pweissbrod 8y ago
  Best to keep them in a friend's closet until the whole thing blows over

134 points by siberianbear 8y ago

50M bees sounds dramatic but can be only one hive. Happens a lot in Australia too (another poster mentioned NZ). Example: https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/18-stolen-bee-hives-found-two-men-arrested/news-story/7ab58f82b19235beb5b1e46c7de821b4 https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/18-stolen-b...

mvidal01 8y ago

There's a few companies selling gps trackers for beehives. https://findmyhive.com/ https://findmyhive.com/ http://www.save-bees.com http://www.save-bees.com https://www.thebeecorp.com/qgps.html https://www.thebeecorp.com/qgps.html

njarboe 8y ago

I wonder if enough bees to pollinate the trees could survive on just being left alone in a almond orchard year round? The almond farms could have hives they leave in their orchards and don't extract the honey so the bees have lots of stored energy. This is the reason the bees make honey in the wild, a stored energy source. Hire a few bee keepers to keep an eye on things and fix problems. No moving around of diseases, stable source of bees, low cost? I know it is all the trend to outsource everything but bees seems pretty core to a fruit/nut tree operation.

craftyguy 8y ago
In theory this sounds great. So I wonder why it's not implemented? Perhaps it results in lower profits for bee keepers since they have to bring up more hives to service the same number of customers?
TimTheTinker 8y ago
Looks to me like the tradeoff is between hiring/paying local beekeepers to tend hives as needed year-round, or paying $200/hive to ship in hives from elsewhere during the flowering season. The latter probably ends up being less expensive, as long as there's enough supply.
pakitan 8y ago
It's too short of a season - few weeks. For the rest of the year, the bees will literally have nothing to forage on and when there is lack of forage, the queen will stop laying eggs, which will eventually lead to colony's death.
lostlogin 8y ago
Almond trees produce no (or very little) nector. Older bees need that to live. Brood will eat pollen though. Googling images of almond orchards, they look like deserts. There is nothing else anywhere near so bees wouldn’t be able to forage anything else to sustain them. Given the look of the land, these orchards are watered, and that must be a massive problem also.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  But do they have to be deserts? Couldn't some kind of cover crop be useful both in terms of bee-feeding and in terms of reducing leeching of soil nutrients?
  - spraak 8y ago
    I think that's a great idea, but seems conflicting to the mindset that the almond farmers have (and most conventional farmers). That is, that's a more whole system mindset (see also permaculture) where farmers growing acres upon acres of just one crop (almonds, corn, soy) see it as discrete and disconnected from other crops and resources.
    - jimnotgym 8y ago
      In the EU farmers are paid to leave wildlife-strips and beetle-banks in their fields. The almond mono-culture I saw on the Netflix series mentioned was shocking to me. It looks like one big drought could turn it into a dust bowl! Land is almost never left as bare soil in Britain due to our wet climate. However before the EU paid for it, and rules were put in to stop removal of hedgerows, the UK was being carved into larger and larger fields of mono-culture cereals.
      - spraak 8y ago
        Ah that's very interesting! You might find Bill Mollison's "Global Gardener" series interesting.
Rotten194 8y ago
No -- beehives rely on near-continuous nectar flow throughout spring and summer, and almonds don't produce enough for long enough to feed a hive.

Scaevolus 8y ago

If you're going to leave a bunch of $1500 hives in a field, wouldn't it make sense to hide trackers in some of them? Netflix's Rotten S01E01 covers much of the same material.

HammadB 8y ago
Rotten is such a fantastic docu-series. Are you aware of any other similar shows?
- mikeyouse 8y ago
  Dirty Money is a similarly themed one about corruption -- the first season covered a great maple syrup heist, Allergan pharmaceuticals, a Payday loan criminal, HSBC's cartel connections, the VW NoX emissions scandal, and Trump's business career. https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100 https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100
  - cwyers 8y ago
    The maple syrup heist episode is amazing. I still can't believe that's real.
burntrelish1273 8y ago
Let's say the amortized cost of a GPS tracker is, conservatively/high-end with a lifetime data plan for updates every hour: $100. Let's say the cost of mean average deployment is $10. Then the break-even point for hive theft is reached if losses are well over 7.33 (bar) %. (110/1500) If losses are high, beekeepers will deploy them. If losses are low, deploying GPS would be more of a fear-based, emotional decision than a rational one.
- golem14 8y ago
  Need only GPS trackers on a sample of the hives, no?
  - 8y ago

jxramos 8y ago

It's never a surprise about the fact that scoundrels find their way into what's lucrative. It's surprising to find out the many ways an economy can find lucrative endeavors.

Troncup1 8y ago
I think bee theft has happened in big cities like Chicago, Berlin and NYC beekeeping https://nycbeekeepers.blogspot.com/p/nyc-beekeeping-groups.html https://nycbeekeepers.blogspot.com/p/nyc-beekeeping-groups.h...

theologic 8y ago

I think this all changes in the nearish future. In my line of work, we sell an extraordinary amount of hard drives to surveillance companies. As an old timer, I've seen this "edge of the wedge" happen twice before, and it feels that it is happening again. I feel that surveillance seems to be equivalent to the PC in 1985 or Smartphones in 2003. In other words, in the same way that society and business was changed forever by the PC or Smartphones, crime will be changed forever by real world tracking. If you lived through PCs or Smartphones, we all said it would change the world, but I think very few (Alan Kay as a prime exception) really internalized the obvious future. The roadmap and growth of the commercial and consumer surveillance companies are absolutely extraordinary. And resolution x cameras x facial recognition = a future society where large things, such as packages in front of your door, bees in a field, or traffic accidents, will all be caught. Within a decade, in the same situation where somebody steals a hive of bees, the people that picked up the hives will almost guaranteed to have evidence from a camera on a face or license plate or vehicle type creating probable cause, so you can get the phone records and coordinates of not only the people that picked up the hives but where they dropped them off. I just think it is going to be much easier to catch bad behavior and ensure punishment. The real question to me is do we have a backlash against this similar to a GDPR? We see that laws are emerging to keep people from tracking us on the web. But will these types of laws be created so that we cannot track people in real life? If society determines that crime is so bad that we allow real world tracking, what happens to crime? Once you know that any physical act in the open will get you caught, does the crime rate drop dramatically except for those that wish to be caught? Do we have a new breed of off the grid criminal? Or a breed of super hacker criminal that evolves to beat the system. I think the most likely is that physical crime drops dramatically because everybody knows they will be caught. As an anime fan, there was program called Psycho-pass. The tenant of the show was a technology that was developed so that any crime would quickly be caught. In many ways a robust surveillance system is this fiction brought to life. One of the most interested arcs (spoilers) is when the system is broken, and the current society is completely unable to deal with the criminals because they have become so naive because the crime rate is so low. I can actually see something like that happening in the future just with a robust surveillance system if society allowed it to happen. Fun time to be alive, and I think we'll all see this story unfold in our life times.

sandworm101 8y ago

Can we get the bees to defend themselves? Like if you pick up a hive incorrectly it breaks open?

kondro 8y ago
Or spray dead bee pheromone on the thieves.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
They do have beekeeping gear.

chrisbennet 8y ago

It would only take a very few GPS locaters between multiple bee keepers to lead law enforcement to the “chop shop”. The bee keeper association could choose bee keepers randomly. If the same insurance company insures multiple bee keepers, it might benefit them to GPS a few of their customers.

bayesian_horse 8y ago
The amount of theft probably hasn't risen to that level yet. It's not so much the trackers, but who is going to track the trackers. They'd have to be on the case fast or risk the thieves removing the trackers.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
lostlogin 8y ago
Yes. Theft here in NZ has thieves specifically seeking out tracking systems (passive, like marked frames) scattering unwanted parts around paddocks and taking good frames only. Keep in mind that the honey frames have to be extracted, and these usually go to an extraction facility so they can notify people if suspicious. This happens frequently in NZ but our market would be far smaller. This part of the process is now requiring tracking here for quality control (quite how is a mystery to beekeepers) and do it wouldn’t be too hard to add a marker of ownership. Barcodes and QR codes are used on boxes and there is plenty of discussion about adding it to frames. It’s too late once the hives have been gone long like in the article. No one in their right mind would want them back as the disease risk is far too great. American foul brood is cured by burning the gear.
- AngryData 8y ago
  I could see buying a bunch of cheap RFID tags and putting them in the frames. Drill a little hole, put it in, fill the rest with glue or epoxy so it is difficult to remove without obvious marks. They could just be a simple number progression that can be recorded in a log, nothing too fancy.

throwaway5752 8y ago

$2.5M USD? Is it still 5 bees for a quarter?

mlindner 8y ago

Those are the worst illustrations I've ever seen in an article. Just wow... https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/imm8kKJFsMQY/v1/-1x-1.jpg https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/imm8kKJFsMQ...

ljw1001 8y ago

I love how-to articles, but I'm really hoping there will be a follow up that explains where to put the 50M bees after I've stolen them.

pweissbrod 8y ago
Best to keep them in a friend's closet until the whole thing blows over