The crisis in bee numbers may be a threat to the world’s food supply, but it is also leading to a different kind of problem for apiarists – the return of the old-fashioned crime of rustling.
Fewer bees means hives, and queens, are worth more. North Wales Police are currently investigating the theft of 30,000 bees and three queens from a honey farm in Anglesey – a crime which follows a spate of similar thefts in the nearby Conwy Valley.
Witnesses report seeing a man in a protective bee-keeping suit, leading to concerns that the bee-keeping community may have been infiltrated by rogue members happy to exploit higher demand.
“There will always be beekeepers who are not necessarily members of a local association,” said Gill Maclean of the British Beekeepers Association. “As in any walk of life there will be some bad apples.”
The nature of the theft means it was likely to be carried out by somebody with knowledge of bee keeping.
“If you lift up a hive, you have to understand it’s in layers and will come apart,” says Gill Smith, Director of EH Thorne Beehives Ltd, the leading retailer of bee colonies. “Word of thefts does tend to get around: it’s a very social thing. If there are thefts in an area, fellow association members will certainly tell one another,” she added.
Stressed young bees forced to grow up too fast could largely account for disastrous declines in populations of the insects around the world (PA)
Bee populations fluctuate yearly and the price of swarms change accordingly. With populations being decimated by disease and environmental factors, a guide price for a starter ‘nucleus’ swarm – consisting of a queen and her entourage – has risen to the upper limit of its £150-£250 price bracket. The hive itself costs a similar price.
And as the pointedly old-fashioned crime of ‘hive rustling’ – also known as hive raiding and swarm theft – rears its head, beekeepers are turning to high-tech measures to protect their swarms.
“A hive full of bees is worth up to £500,” says Huw Evans, 46, managing director of Arnia, which monitors hives remotely. “That’s the same price as a laptop, and you wouldn’t leave one of them in a field – let alone lined up one next to the other.
“In the past five years the cost of bees has rocketed. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand: the fewer bees there are, the more they cost. The more valuable, the more likely they are to be stolen.”
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There is some speculation that in the case of the Anglesey bees, the thief may have known that they were a particularly docile colony. Owner Katie Hayward had bred and raised the combination of Welsh Blacks and Buckfast bees, to be used in school visits.
Similar thefts occur every year and police have not yet linked the latest incident to the spate of thefts in Conwy Valley. However, Ms Hayward says she would not be surprised if they were carried out by the same culprit. “Things like this have happened in England but not north Wales,” she says.
Beekeeper and Chairman of The London Beekeepers Association John Chapple installs a new bee hive on an urban rooftop garden in Hackney (Getty)
She added that she has been left devastated by the theft. “I’ve not stopped sobbing for three days now,” she said. “I’m sat at home every night thinking ‘are they out there?’ It’s not the nicest thing to be sat at home looking out of a black window wondering who’s pinched your bees.”
Ms Hayward holds little hope of being reunited with her bees. She believes that her hives will have been sold on the black market.
As well as the increasing cost of bees, Hayward believes an upsurge in the price of locally-produced honey could have motivated the thefts. In the five years since she has been beekeeping, the price of a jar has risen from £5 to £7.90, making hives more lucrative.
In similar incidents, four beehives were stolen in Cambridge late last year, while in June a beekeeper in Staffordshire found one of his hives abandoned in a neighbour’s field – apparently after the thief was attacked bybees.
