Hive theft has recently become an issue here in Ca. CA being CA...hives used for pollination services are taxed differently than hives used for honey/orchard p

Hive theft has recently become an issue here in Ca. CA being CA...hives used for pollination services are taxed differently than hives used for honey/orchard pollination. Insurance also treats them differently. More: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/05/bee-thieves-cost-beekeepers-thousands/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2019/05/bee-thiev... [..] “I couldn’t think. I kept messing up the count,” he told me, sitting at a friend’s kitchen table the next morning, shaking his head. He’d hardly slept. “Over half of them were gone, 160 boxes”—days before California’s almond bloom, the biggest and most lucrative pollination event in the world. “Those thieves stole about $70,000 from me,” he said, tallying the insects, equipment, and lost pollination rental fees. Kuhnhenn, 39—tattooed, with a brown beard, and wearing a black “Right To Bear Arms” T-shirt and jeans—is a commercial beekeeper from Bantry, North Dakota. Like many others in his profession, he makes the bulk of his living from an annual pilgrimage to the Central Valley, where his bees help pollinate the state’s almond crop. In the off-season, back home on his ranch, Bulldog Honey Farms, he manufactures about 80 pounds of summer honey. Wintertime is almond season, and he’d been preparing for the bloom all year. His hives were ready to move into position in the almond orchards. Now was that time, and a bunch of his bees were gone.[..]