Not far from Silicon Valley, a technological boom is occurring among beekeepers desperate to find new ways to avoid hives being stolen by criminals amid a dwindling supply of bees across the US.
Thefts are becoming so common in the Central Valley area of California that beekeepers are using GPS tracking devices, surveillance cameras and other anti-theft technology to safeguard their honeybee colonies.
According to the Associated Press, 1,036 beehives worth hundreds of thousands of dollars have been reported stolen in California, including a heist in which 384 beehives were spirited away in Mendocino county.
“We have do what we can to protect ourselves,” Helio Medino, a beekeeper who had 282 hives stolen last year, told the AP. “Nobody can help us.”
The Central Valley is responsible for about a quarter of all produce grown in the US but beekeepers from all corners of the country are drawn to the region primarily for the enormous pollination demands of the almond industry, which has doubled in size over the past two decades.
There are 1.17m acres of almonds in California that require pollination. At a standard rate of two beehives an acre, that means the industry somehow needs to amass 2.34m beehives for a short window of time each February, when almond trees start to blossom.
This demand requires that approximately 90% of all managed US honeybee colonies are strapped to trucks and sent to the Central Valley when the trees are in flower.
Thieves, typically people with knowledge of beekeeping, are targeting the hives at night, as they are set down near orchards or in holding areas. Organized gangs are behind some of the thefts, police say, with hives quickly moved on for resale after identifying markers are removed.
Thefts are escalating because of the tightening supply of bees and soaring pollination fees: almond farmers who paid about $50 to rent a single beehive a few years ago now often pay more than $200 a hive. Stealing hives has therefore become relatively lucrative.
“Normal people can’t just go steal 500 hives with a forklift and a truck,” Charley Nye, a beekeeper researcher at University of California, Davis, told the Guardian in 2020.
“So it’s a pretty small pool of people that are able to steal them. But the reward is so big that I think it can be tempting to people to do that.”
Honeybees are being assailed by disease, loss of habitat to monocultural farmland and widespread use of pesticides. The drought that has gripped the western US has also weakened colonies, piling further pressure on beekeepers to maintain numbers for the huge logistical exercise of pollinating crops.
The effort put in to replenish honeybee populations for agricultural purposes is not replicated for the thousands of wild bee species in the US, however. 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 a widespread decline of bee species is risking food security in parts of the world, with the demands for pollinated crops increasing by 300% worldwide in the past 50 years as the pollination supply falters due to habitat destruction, the use of poisonous insecticides and the climate crisis.
Oliver Milman is the author of The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires That Run The World, published in the UK by Atlantic and in the US by WW Norton
