11 ms·

The Rise of the Bee Bandits

42 points by jger15 3y ago

JohnMakin 2y ago
The biggest problem I have with this is a question this article is not asking - do we need to devote so many resources to growing almonds? The water usage alone is a little ridiculous in a state that has droughts that almost certainly will get worse over time. 17% of the total agricultural water allocation in CA (which is a buttload of water) goes to growing almonds.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  One thing is certain, there are a bunch of things in that production chain which are not priced correctly.
- observationist 2y ago
  It's completely irresponsible and ignorant of long term consequences. Private almond farms (among other crops) are allowed to egregiously consume insane quantities of finite resources, resulting in huge disparity in the benefits from those resources that should be a common good. Politicians get funded by wealthy farmers, and farmers get wealthier by funding politicians. In addition to almond farms, there are all sorts of alfalfa and feed crops produced with a high water weight that get shipped overseas or to other states. Whatever mechanisms most states have in play to manage their water resources are completely inadequate, and they should probably be overhauled. The only reason almonds and other water intensive crops are grown is because there's an exploitable difference in the valuation of the product and the cost of one or more resources required for production. The problem can be regulated and rectified, but the people with money have a big advantage.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    "The problem can be regulated and rectified," What exactly is the problem and how can it be rectified? Sure, we could make farmers pay actual costs and eliminate subsidies. We will also massively cut production because local farm can't compete with overseas crop prices. It's also possible the rich countries buyout crops from the poor and create famines or the breakdown of free trade (or we abandon the US version of free trade and tax imports to match domestic prices).
    - kurthr 2y ago
      I think you'd want a justification for subsidizing selected farmers and foreign countries imports other than, it makes the largest landowners the highest short term profit. None of it will exist long term unless global warming increases rainfall in the western US. How to rectify? The simplest is to charge/tax farming with scarce water for export. The next is to allow metro purchase of water rights (already happening).
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > What exactly is the problem and how can it be rectified? California has a smaller water budget than before. Use has to be cut from somewhere, and to date, those cuts have been disproportionately borne by the 10% that goes to urban users. There should be a fixed amount of water every farm and household gets for free, and after that, a market rate for it. (This is complicated by the history of Western water rights.) > will also massively cut production because local farm can't compete with overseas crop prices The world doesn't have that much arable land [1]. America has most of it (and somewhat uniquley, a growing share), and moreover, it's bang next to the world's largest consumers. Those are difficult built-in advantages to fuck up. (I'm not even counting the various federal agricultural subisides and trade protections.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        > those cuts have been disproportionately borne by the 10% that goes to urban users This is really the core of my frustration - if you're a CA resident, and don't live in the central valley or work in the agriculture business, what possible benefit to you is supplying most of the world's supply of almonds? Water, especially in the southwest, is an increasingly scarce and valuable resource. Why would california residents want to subsidize the rest of the world's almond consumption? (Honestly I think they don't, but the political reasons behind this are complex and depressing and way off track of the subject matter of this thread)
        observationist 2y ago
- danielvf 2y ago
  My understanding is that the overall move towards almonds is actually a move towards crops that are efficient in terms of dollars of income for a fixed amount of water. Wheat exports for $250 per ton of wheat. This month almonds export at $3,783 per ton. (This is actually down quite a bit from before and is resulting in fewer almonds being grown this year.) In other words, given that farmers have a roughly fixed allotment of water to work from, if you completely banned all almond growing from CA, farmers would just use that same water on other plants and water usage would not change at all.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    You're making the assumption that the water supply is fungible, infinite, and predictable - every year we've had severe drought, they don't cut back on agriculture, they cut back on consumer's water. I also don't think the current level of consumption will be sustainable, so although I do agree they'd try to use the same amount, the net result will be less water for people who actually need/use it to live.
- tylershuster 2y ago
  Restraint is not part of the free-market calculus. Sure, people like to tout "sustainability" but only as a means of selling yet more products. It's not profitable to fast. Well, it's not materially profitable. Until the well dries up.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > 17% of the total agricultural water allocation in CA (which is a buttload of water) goes to growing almonds To put that into perspective, that is almost twice as much water as California's cities use in total [1]. [1] https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/06_June/June2019_Item_12_Attach_2_PPICFactSheets.pdf https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/... 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban
- langsoul-com 2y ago
  Farmers will grow what's most rewarding, right now its almonds. Unless there's rule or pricing changes, it ain't gonna stop. Near every country has the golden crop, that produces so much more money than the rest.
imzadi 2y ago
I'm guessing the bees are just going in circles, steal from person A and sell to person B. Now person A needs bees, so steal from person C and sell to Person A, and it keeps going like that. The smaller and poorer beeks won't be able to afford to buy back their bees (or replacement bees), which will ultimately consolidate all the bees among a few wealthier groups. Once most bees are controlled by a few people/groups, they'll fund the infrastructure needed to keep the bees more secure.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Reminds me of an Italo Calvino short story.
kazinator 2y ago
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- throwup238 2y ago
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    - pimlottc 2y ago
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    - throwup238 2y ago
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- schoen 2y ago
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- kennyadam 2y ago
  Please, this garbage pun nonsense made Reddit significantly worse and it’s such low effort content that really doesn’t need to get a foothold on HN.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
jna_sh 2y ago
Funny, I went out on hive maintenance round with a local beekeeper here in the Netherlands, and he was telling me about bee thefts. Not even whole hives, he’s had other beekeepers go in and steal just the queens, effectively killing the hive in the process.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  Taking the queen doesn't kill the hive, not if they have enough 1- or 2-day eggs that the bees can make new queens out of. But it does happen that there aren't enough sometimes, so taking the queen can kill the hive. For example, I did a split about twelve days ago, and the new hive started making queens. Now this was a very aggressive hive, so we wanted to re-queen it, so about eight days in we went back and destroyed every emergency queen cell, then two days later we went back and gave them a new queen that we purchased -- one bred specifically for mite resistance and which is not africanized. If we hadn't done this then that hive would be about to get a new queen naturally (and that queen would then kill all the other about-to-hatch queens). Though, even if they make a new queen, there will be a brood break. A brood break is a time period during which no new eggs are laid. Here it would be about three weeks, and maybe a few more days. It takes time for the new queen to hatch, get mated, and start laying. If this happens at the height of a honey flow then the hive will be made much weaker because the workers live just six weeks in that time of the year. Beekeepers tend to force a short brood break in the fall to forestall the mites, but this is a bit much. I don't have enough experience to say for sure, but I would expect that stealing queens will typically cause loss of maybe 50% of hives -- more or less depending on the time of the year. Also, if the beekeeper inspects hives weekly (a big if, especially if the beek has thousands of hives) they will notice that the hive is queenless and will probably re-queen it sooner than the time it takes the hive to make a new queen, thus reducing the loss rate. Commercial queens are about $45, but they're not available year-round. A commercial beekeeper might even raise their own queens for themselves, so they might have better availability. So hive loss rate might be lower, though still, it's not cheap, and it's labor intensive to inspect every hive weekly.
  - jna_sh 2y ago
    Thanks for the detailed explanation!
DoreenMichele 2y ago
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 of the U.S. In addition to points made by others here, I wonder also about our general drop in bees and other insects. I am astonished this one crop hogs so many resources and I don't know how to feel about it. I like almonds and would like to someday learn to make homemade marzipan like my mother made when I was a child (sweetened almond paste, basically). Almonds get vilified for their water use in California and, meanwhile, people are also hating on the meat industry and promoting veganism. It seems to me nuts are an important part of a vegetarian diet and should be even more important to a vegan diet. I have a lot of half formed questions but no real answers, questions that have rattled around my brain for some time without ever quite gelling.
- schoen 2y ago
  I'm vegan and have given up almonds because I'm prone to kidney stones, and I was told that almonds have a much higher oxalate content than other nuts. Not everyone has a tendency to form kidney stones, but in my case it seems like I started to suffer from them right around the time that grocery stores and cafés started to switch from soy milk to almond milk, so I think that may have been the biggest problem. (I haven't had any more stones so far since switching to oat milk and starting to take citrate pills every day.) I still eat a fair amount of nuts, often peanuts, which are lower in oxalate. I appreciate cashew (and coconut!) as an alternative to almonds that are still high in fat, like for making ice cream out of. I think one reason almonds and almond milk have been so popular is their pleasantly high fat content. I don't have any particular intuition for how much water these other nuts take to produce.
  - DoreenMichele 2y ago
    Peanuts are a legume, not a nut. Coconuts are a drupe, which I had to look up and didn't know. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupe
toss1 2y ago
The victims and police are looking for tire tracks. Seems it'd be worthwhile for the beekeepers to invest in a bunch of game cameras and set them up every time they setup their hives unattended. They could at least get some faces, vehicle images, and possibly license tags, which would be a big head start in tracking the thieves. Mobile-connected cameras would be even better. IDK how dense license plate readers are in the Central Valley, but if there are even a few, they could likely catch perps within hours, even yellow-handed. Seems crazy to not apply at least a bit of technology when you are leaving valuable animals worth $five to $seven figures by the side of a field.
- cryptonector 2y ago
  You could place an airtag in some of your hives. Cheaper than a new queen.

42 points by jger15 3y ago

The biggest problem I have with this is a question this article is not asking - do we need to devote so many resources to growing almonds? The water usage alone is a little ridiculous in a state that has droughts that almost certainly will get worse over time. 17% of the total agricultural water allocation in CA (which is a buttload of water) goes to growing almonds.

colechristensen 2y ago
One thing is certain, there are a bunch of things in that production chain which are not priced correctly.
observationist 2y ago
It's completely irresponsible and ignorant of long term consequences. Private almond farms (among other crops) are allowed to egregiously consume insane quantities of finite resources, resulting in huge disparity in the benefits from those resources that should be a common good. Politicians get funded by wealthy farmers, and farmers get wealthier by funding politicians. In addition to almond farms, there are all sorts of alfalfa and feed crops produced with a high water weight that get shipped overseas or to other states. Whatever mechanisms most states have in play to manage their water resources are completely inadequate, and they should probably be overhauled. The only reason almonds and other water intensive crops are grown is because there's an exploitable difference in the valuation of the product and the cost of one or more resources required for production. The problem can be regulated and rectified, but the people with money have a big advantage.
- giantg2 2y ago
  "The problem can be regulated and rectified," What exactly is the problem and how can it be rectified? Sure, we could make farmers pay actual costs and eliminate subsidies. We will also massively cut production because local farm can't compete with overseas crop prices. It's also possible the rich countries buyout crops from the poor and create famines or the breakdown of free trade (or we abandon the US version of free trade and tax imports to match domestic prices).
  - kurthr 2y ago
    I think you'd want a justification for subsidizing selected farmers and foreign countries imports other than, it makes the largest landowners the highest short term profit. None of it will exist long term unless global warming increases rainfall in the western US. How to rectify? The simplest is to charge/tax farming with scarce water for export. The next is to allow metro purchase of water rights (already happening).
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > What exactly is the problem and how can it be rectified? California has a smaller water budget than before. Use has to be cut from somewhere, and to date, those cuts have been disproportionately borne by the 10% that goes to urban users. There should be a fixed amount of water every farm and household gets for free, and after that, a market rate for it. (This is complicated by the history of Western water rights.) > will also massively cut production because local farm can't compete with overseas crop prices The world doesn't have that much arable land [1]. America has most of it (and somewhat uniquley, a growing share), and moreover, it's bang next to the world's largest consumers. Those are difficult built-in advantages to fuck up. (I'm not even counting the various federal agricultural subisides and trade protections.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arable_land
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      > those cuts have been disproportionately borne by the 10% that goes to urban users This is really the core of my frustration - if you're a CA resident, and don't live in the central valley or work in the agriculture business, what possible benefit to you is supplying most of the world's supply of almonds? Water, especially in the southwest, is an increasingly scarce and valuable resource. Why would california residents want to subsidize the rest of the world's almond consumption? (Honestly I think they don't, but the political reasons behind this are complex and depressing and way off track of the subject matter of this thread)
      - observationist 2y ago
danielvf 2y ago
My understanding is that the overall move towards almonds is actually a move towards crops that are efficient in terms of dollars of income for a fixed amount of water. Wheat exports for $250 per ton of wheat. This month almonds export at $3,783 per ton. (This is actually down quite a bit from before and is resulting in fewer almonds being grown this year.) In other words, given that farmers have a roughly fixed allotment of water to work from, if you completely banned all almond growing from CA, farmers would just use that same water on other plants and water usage would not change at all.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  You're making the assumption that the water supply is fungible, infinite, and predictable - every year we've had severe drought, they don't cut back on agriculture, they cut back on consumer's water. I also don't think the current level of consumption will be sustainable, so although I do agree they'd try to use the same amount, the net result will be less water for people who actually need/use it to live.
tylershuster 2y ago
Restraint is not part of the free-market calculus. Sure, people like to tout "sustainability" but only as a means of selling yet more products. It's not profitable to fast. Well, it's not materially profitable. Until the well dries up.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> 17% of the total agricultural water allocation in CA (which is a buttload of water) goes to growing almonds To put that into perspective, that is almost twice as much water as California's cities use in total [1]. [1] https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/06_June/June2019_Item_12_Attach_2_PPICFactSheets.pdf https://cwc.ca.gov/-/media/CWC-Website/Files/Documents/2019/... 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban
langsoul-com 2y ago
Farmers will grow what's most rewarding, right now its almonds. Unless there's rule or pricing changes, it ain't gonna stop. Near every country has the golden crop, that produces so much more money than the rest.

imzadi 2y ago

I'm guessing the bees are just going in circles, steal from person A and sell to person B. Now person A needs bees, so steal from person C and sell to Person A, and it keeps going like that. The smaller and poorer beeks won't be able to afford to buy back their bees (or replacement bees), which will ultimately consolidate all the bees among a few wealthier groups. Once most bees are controlled by a few people/groups, they'll fund the infrastructure needed to keep the bees more secure.

cryptonector 2y ago
Reminds me of an Italo Calvino short story.

kazinator 2y ago

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throwup238 2y ago
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- kazinator 2y ago
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- kazinator 2y ago
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  - pimlottc 2y ago
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  - throwup238 2y ago
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    - kazinator 2y ago
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schoen 2y ago
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kennyadam 2y ago
Please, this garbage pun nonsense made Reddit significantly worse and it’s such low effort content that really doesn’t need to get a foothold on HN.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

jna_sh 2y ago

Funny, I went out on hive maintenance round with a local beekeeper here in the Netherlands, and he was telling me about bee thefts. Not even whole hives, he’s had other beekeepers go in and steal just the queens, effectively killing the hive in the process.

cryptonector 2y ago
Taking the queen doesn't kill the hive, not if they have enough 1- or 2-day eggs that the bees can make new queens out of. But it does happen that there aren't enough sometimes, so taking the queen can kill the hive. For example, I did a split about twelve days ago, and the new hive started making queens. Now this was a very aggressive hive, so we wanted to re-queen it, so about eight days in we went back and destroyed every emergency queen cell, then two days later we went back and gave them a new queen that we purchased -- one bred specifically for mite resistance and which is not africanized. If we hadn't done this then that hive would be about to get a new queen naturally (and that queen would then kill all the other about-to-hatch queens). Though, even if they make a new queen, there will be a brood break. A brood break is a time period during which no new eggs are laid. Here it would be about three weeks, and maybe a few more days. It takes time for the new queen to hatch, get mated, and start laying. If this happens at the height of a honey flow then the hive will be made much weaker because the workers live just six weeks in that time of the year. Beekeepers tend to force a short brood break in the fall to forestall the mites, but this is a bit much. I don't have enough experience to say for sure, but I would expect that stealing queens will typically cause loss of maybe 50% of hives -- more or less depending on the time of the year. Also, if the beekeeper inspects hives weekly (a big if, especially if the beek has thousands of hives) they will notice that the hive is queenless and will probably re-queen it sooner than the time it takes the hive to make a new queen, thus reducing the loss rate. Commercial queens are about $45, but they're not available year-round. A commercial beekeeper might even raise their own queens for themselves, so they might have better availability. So hive loss rate might be lower, though still, it's not cheap, and it's labor intensive to inspect every hive weekly.
- jna_sh 2y ago
  Thanks for the detailed explanation!

DoreenMichele 2y ago

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 of the U.S. In addition to points made by others here, I wonder also about our general drop in bees and other insects. I am astonished this one crop hogs so many resources and I don't know how to feel about it. I like almonds and would like to someday learn to make homemade marzipan like my mother made when I was a child (sweetened almond paste, basically). Almonds get vilified for their water use in California and, meanwhile, people are also hating on the meat industry and promoting veganism. It seems to me nuts are an important part of a vegetarian diet and should be even more important to a vegan diet. I have a lot of half formed questions but no real answers, questions that have rattled around my brain for some time without ever quite gelling.

schoen 2y ago
I'm vegan and have given up almonds because I'm prone to kidney stones, and I was told that almonds have a much higher oxalate content than other nuts. Not everyone has a tendency to form kidney stones, but in my case it seems like I started to suffer from them right around the time that grocery stores and cafés started to switch from soy milk to almond milk, so I think that may have been the biggest problem. (I haven't had any more stones so far since switching to oat milk and starting to take citrate pills every day.) I still eat a fair amount of nuts, often peanuts, which are lower in oxalate. I appreciate cashew (and coconut!) as an alternative to almonds that are still high in fat, like for making ice cream out of. I think one reason almonds and almond milk have been so popular is their pleasantly high fat content. I don't have any particular intuition for how much water these other nuts take to produce.
- DoreenMichele 2y ago
  Peanuts are a legume, not a nut. Coconuts are a drupe, which I had to look up and didn't know. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupe

toss1 2y ago

The victims and police are looking for tire tracks. Seems it'd be worthwhile for the beekeepers to invest in a bunch of game cameras and set them up every time they setup their hives unattended. They could at least get some faces, vehicle images, and possibly license tags, which would be a big head start in tracking the thieves. Mobile-connected cameras would be even better. IDK how dense license plate readers are in the Central Valley, but if there are even a few, they could likely catch perps within hours, even yellow-handed. Seems crazy to not apply at least a bit of technology when you are leaving valuable animals worth $five to $seven figures by the side of a field.

cryptonector 2y ago
You could place an airtag in some of your hives. Cheaper than a new queen.