Standing in the way of the bee rustlers — often alone — is Rowdy Freeman, a deputy at the Butte County Sheriff’s Office in California’s 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.
Last year, according to Freeman calculations, a record of more than 2,300 honeybee hives were stolen in the Central Valley. This year’s 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.
“I’m trying to get more help for this because it’s become a major problem, it’s getting out of control,” 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.
“It’s just me,” he said. “The state of California has done nothing to help.”
The Honeybee Era
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 of the U.S.
For some time at the start of each year, the Central Valley becomes a sort of giant, mechanized jamboree of honeybees, with 18-wheelers 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 — 2.7 million hives, according to Wenger, or a lowball estimate of some 54 billion bees to support this year’s almond crop — there is little to compare to the annual seething mass of bees clustered in California outside of enthralling wild scenes like the African migration of wildebeest.
“It makes you think you’re reading an old western about moving 7,000 head of cattle across the high plains,” said Jacob Wenger, an entomologist at California State University, Fresno. “But even then, it wasn’t 90% of all the beef cattle in the United States.”
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.
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’s needed to spirit away tens of thousands of dollars of humming property. (...)
Bee Thief Gangs
As a detective working these cases, Freeman looks for clues like tire tracks in the mud. But most leads come through the information bouncing around the fraternity of mostly male beekeepers who congregate in California each year. The reality is that given the specialized knowledge necessary to handle loading millions of buzzing flying creatures speedily and safely onto trucks at night, such thievery almost certainly involves an inside man — another member of this beekeeping brethren.
Lately, the talk in beekeeping circles has been about whether the surging thefts are the work of the typical solo opportunists wanting to supplement a bad year, or a larger and more organized effort. The theft of hundreds of hives in one go, like in Steinbrugger’s case, pointed to the latter. Such an efficient heist points to a level of organization that only a criminal group, or gang, could pull off.
The closest police have come to breaking up such a gang was after Alexa Pavlov, a Missouri-based beekeeper, received a tip in 2017 that some of her stolen hives might be found in a patch of scrubby land a few miles outside Fresno, California. Pavlov jumped on a plane and went straight to the site, which police later described as a “chop shop for bees.” Clouds of bees flew around dozens of scattered boxes belonging to different beekeepers, some of which appeared to be in the process of being split apart. Nearby, a gaunt 51-year-old Pavel Tveretinov, was spotted tending to this Frankenstein-like apiary. Pavlov contacted police who subsequently arrested and charged Tveretinov along with an accomplice, Vitaliy Yeroshenko.
The haul was extraordinary. There were more than 2,500 hives, valued at nearly $1 million, belonging to a dozen beekeepers, stolen over several years. (...)
As a detective working these cases, Freeman looks for clues like tire tracks in the mud. But most leads come through the information bouncing around the fraternity of mostly male beekeepers who congregate in California each year. The reality is that given the specialized knowledge necessary to handle loading millions of buzzing flying creatures speedily and safely onto trucks at night, such thievery almost certainly involves an inside man — another member of this beekeeping brethren.
Lately, the talk in beekeeping circles has been about whether the surging thefts are the work of the typical solo opportunists wanting to supplement a bad year, or a larger and more organized effort. The theft of hundreds of hives in one go, like in Steinbrugger’s case, pointed to the latter. Such an efficient heist points to a level of organization that only a criminal group, or gang, could pull off.
The closest police have come to breaking up such a gang was after Alexa Pavlov, a Missouri-based beekeeper, received a tip in 2017 that some of her stolen hives might be found in a patch of scrubby land a few miles outside Fresno, California. Pavlov jumped on a plane and went straight to the site, which police later described as a “chop shop for bees.” Clouds of bees flew around dozens of scattered boxes belonging to different beekeepers, some of which appeared to be in the process of being split apart. Nearby, a gaunt 51-year-old Pavel Tveretinov, was spotted tending to this Frankenstein-like apiary. Pavlov contacted police who subsequently arrested and charged Tveretinov along with an accomplice, Vitaliy Yeroshenko.
The haul was extraordinary. There were more than 2,500 hives, valued at nearly $1 million, belonging to a dozen beekeepers, stolen over several years. (...)
The Ideal Mobile Pollinator
The Western honeybee — or apis mellifera — is among the most successful of all migrants to America. First brought over on wooden ships by European settlers in the 17th century, honeybees have since established themselves not only as a crucial cog in the agricultural system, but they have also flourished in the public imagination.
Conjure up thoughts of a bee and you’ll likely think of a black and yellow striped creature with a stinger that lives in a hive with thousands of comrades making honey. But that image of a honeybee is just one of around 20,000 species of bee, most of them solitary and wild. “There are relatively few bee species that get love and care from humans,” said James Nieh, a bee expert at the University of California, San Diego. “The word ‘bee’ is boiled down to honeybee.” (...)
To grow a lot of almonds you need a lot of bees. The plants need plenty of cross-pollination and will keep producing nuts until they start falling off the tree. The global growth in demand has prompted farmers across the Central Valley to blanket the countryside with these distinctive, white-blossomed trees. Today, around 1.4 million acres, mostly in the Central Valley, is used to produce roughly 80% of the world’s almonds.
Troubling Times For Bee Shepherds
The industrialized honeybee has replaced the bucolic image of honey-producing homesteaders. Each honeybee hive can now command up to $225 in pollination fees, a sizable jump on what it once was.
But while there are financial rewards for beekeepers, it’s harder for the bees. Almond pollination occurs in January and February when the hives’ bees are at the groggiest and weakest points in their lifecycle; they must be spurred into shape by a procession of treatments and feeds. The bees are loaded onto trucks to make their prolonged journeys to the Central Valley, in some cases traveling more than 1,000 miles. This forced migration, with its fumes and vibrations, can also harm the tiny passengers. (...)
“My biggest stress is keeping my employees alive,” said Jeffrey Lee, a beekeeper in North Carolina who estimates that he loses 10% of his bees each time he sends them to California. Lee describes himself as a “bee shepherd,” who guides his indentured workers on a tour around the country for different pollination demands — blueberries in Maine, almonds in California, then cucumbers back in North Carolina. (...)
Unlike wild bees, honeybees have been mostly shielded from catastrophic colony loss by their human guardians. Meanwhile, the American bumblebee, once the most commonly observed bumblebee in the U.S., has suffered an 89% drop in abundance and vanished from at least eight states over the past two decades, according to a 2021 petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and a group of Albany Law School students arguing that the American bumblebee should be listed as an endangered species.
Honeybees may be a good mascot for a campaign to save the bees, but they’re “kind of like the chickens of the bee world,” Wenger said. “They really are bred for human purposes. It’s like saying we are protecting bird diversity by putting in more chicken farms.”
Unlike wild bees, honeybees have been mostly shielded from catastrophic colony loss by their human guardians. Meanwhile, the American bumblebee, once the most commonly observed bumblebee in the U.S., has suffered an 89% drop in abundance and vanished from at least eight states over the past two decades, according to a 2021 petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity and a group of Albany Law School students arguing that the American bumblebee should be listed as an endangered species.
Honeybees may be a good mascot for a campaign to save the bees, but they’re “kind of like the chickens of the bee world,” Wenger said. “They really are bred for human purposes. It’s like saying we are protecting bird diversity by putting in more chicken farms.”
by Oliver Milman, Noema | Read more:
Image: Alex Valentina for Noema Magazine[ed. But, also: Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees? (WaPo):]
"Where in the unholy heck did all these bees come from?!
After almost two decades of relentless colony collapse coverage and years of grieving suspiciously clean windshields, we were stunned to run the numbers on the new Census of Agriculture (otherwise known as that wonderful time every five years where the government counts all the llamas): America’s honeybee population has rocketed to an all-time high.
We’ve added almost a million bee colonies in the past five years. We now have 3.8 million, the census shows. Since 2007, the first census after alarming bee die-offs began in 2006, the honeybee has been the fastest-growing livestock segment in the country! And that doesn’t count feral honeybees, which may outnumber their captive cousins several times over. (...)
Much of the explosion of small producers came in just one state: Texas. The Lone Star State has gone from having the sixth-most bee operations in the country to being so far ahead of anyone else that it out-bees the bottom 21 states combined. (...)
Dennis Herbert wouldn’t strike you as a political mover and shaker. A retired wildlife biologist, Herbert, 75, boasts of no fancy connections and drops no names. But in 2011, after keeping bees for a few years, he went to the Texas legislature and laid out a simple hypothetical.
“You own 200 acres on the other side of the fence from me, and you raise cotton for a living. You get your ag valuation and cheaper taxes on your property. I have 10 acres on the other side of the fence and raise bees, and I don’t receive my ag valuation. And yet my bees are flying across the fence and pollinating your crops and making a living for you,” Herbert said. “Well, I just never thought that quite fair.”
In 2012, the Herbert Hypothetical gave rise to a new law: Your plot of five to 20 acres now qualifies for agriculture tax breaks if you keep bees on it for five years.
Over the next few years, all 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break. Herbert keeps a spreadsheet of the regulations and drives across the state to educate bee-curious landowners. (...)
While Herbert never intended it, Texas bee exemptions have become big business." (...)
But even with its army of small producers, Texas still ranks only sixth in the number of actual bee colonies. To find the true core of the bee boom, we had to make like the Village People and go west.
When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop “demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year.”
Dennis Herbert wouldn’t strike you as a political mover and shaker. A retired wildlife biologist, Herbert, 75, boasts of no fancy connections and drops no names. But in 2011, after keeping bees for a few years, he went to the Texas legislature and laid out a simple hypothetical.
“You own 200 acres on the other side of the fence from me, and you raise cotton for a living. You get your ag valuation and cheaper taxes on your property. I have 10 acres on the other side of the fence and raise bees, and I don’t receive my ag valuation. And yet my bees are flying across the fence and pollinating your crops and making a living for you,” Herbert said. “Well, I just never thought that quite fair.”
In 2012, the Herbert Hypothetical gave rise to a new law: Your plot of five to 20 acres now qualifies for agriculture tax breaks if you keep bees on it for five years.
Over the next few years, all 254 Texas counties adopted bee rules requiring, for example, six hives on five acres plus another hive for every 2.5 acres beyond that to qualify for the tax break. Herbert keeps a spreadsheet of the regulations and drives across the state to educate bee-curious landowners. (...)
While Herbert never intended it, Texas bee exemptions have become big business." (...)
But even with its army of small producers, Texas still ranks only sixth in the number of actual bee colonies. To find the true core of the bee boom, we had to make like the Village People and go west.
When the census was taken in December 2022, California had more than four times as many bees as any other state. We emailed pollination expert Brittney Goodrich at the University of California at Davis, who explained that pollinating the California almond crop “demands most of the honeybee colonies in the U.S. each year.”
