California beekeepers use GPS monitoring and cameras to thwart hive theft | Agriculture

Not far from Silicon Valley, a tech boom is taking place among beekeepers desperate for new ways to stop criminals from stealing beehives as the supply of bees in the US dwindles.

Theft is becoming so common in California’s Central Valley that beekeepers are using GPS trackers, surveillance cameras, and other anti-theft technologies to protect their honey bee colonies.

According to the Associated Press, 1,036 beehives worth hundreds of thousands of dollars were reported stolen in California, including a raid that took away 384 beehives in Mendocino County.

“We have to do what we can to protect ourselves,” Helio Medino, a beekeeper who had 282 hives stolen last year, told the AP. “No one can help us.”

The Central Valley is responsible for about a quarter of all produce grown in the United States, but beekeepers from all corners of the country are drawn to the region primarily for the huge pollination needs of the almond industry, which has doubled in the past two decades.

In California there are 1.17 million acres of almonds that need pollination. At a standard rate of two hives per acre, this means the industry must amass 2.34 million hives for a brief window every February when the almond trees begin to bloom.

This requirement requires about 90% of all managed US honey bee colonies to be strapped onto trucks and shipped to the Central Valley when the trees are in bloom.

Thieves, typically those with knowledge of beekeeping, target the hives at night when dropped near orchards or in holding areas. Organized gangs are behind some thefts, police say, with the hives quickly shipped on for resale after the identifying tags were removed.

Theft is on the rise due to the dwindling supply of bees and rising pollination fees: almond farmers who paid about $50 to rent a single hive a few years ago are now often paying more than $200 per hive. Stealing beehives has therefore become relatively lucrative.

“Ordinary people can’t just steal 500 hives with a forklift and a truck,” Charley Nye, a beekeeping researcher at the University of California, Davis, told the Guardian in 2020.

“So it’s a pretty small group of people who can steal them. But the reward is so great that I think it can be tempting for people to do that.”

Honey bees are plagued by disease, loss of their habitat to monocultural farmland, and widespread use of pesticides. The drought that has gripped the western United States has also weakened colonies, further increasing the pressure on beekeepers to keep up numbers for the enormous logistical effort of pollinating plants.

However, the efforts being made to replenish honeybee populations for agricultural purposes are not being replicated for the thousands of wild bee species in the US. About a quarter of North America’s 46 bumblebee species are in decline and threatened with extinction, according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

Experts have warned that widespread declines in bee species are threatening food security in parts of the world, as global demand for pollinated crops has increased by 300% over the past 50 years as pollination supplies dwindle due to habitat destruction and use of Toxins stalled Insecticides and the climate crisis.