WOODLAND, Calif. (AP) — For a few frenzied weeks, beekeepers move truckloads of honeybees from around the United States to California to rent them out to farmers to pollinate the state’s most valuable crop.
But as almond flowers start to bloom this time of year, so begins beehive thefts that have become so prevalent, beekeepers are turning to technology to protect their precious colonies.
The past few weeks, more than 300 hives worth tens of thousands of dollars were reported stolen in the San Joaquin Valley.
Another 384 vanished from a field in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, prompting the state’s beekeeper association to offer a $10,000 reward for information leading to their recovery.
“It’s hard to articulate how it feels to care for your hives all year only to have them stolen from you,” Claire Tauzer wrote on Facebook to spread the word about the reward.
A few days later, she said an anonymous tipster led authorities to recover the boxes of bees 20 miles away on a rural property. One suspect was arrested.
The rustler is usually a beekeeper or someone familiar with the transportation of bees, working in the cover of night when the insects are less active.
A tightening supply of bees and the soaring cost to rent a hive for pollination — jumping from about $40 per hive two decades ago to as much as $230 per hive this year — are likely motivating beekeepers to go rogue.
The demand for bees have steadily risen during that same time period, as global popularity of the healthy, crunchy nut turned California into the world’s biggest producer of almonds.
Accordingly, the amount of land used to grow almonds has more than doubled to an estimated 1.3 million acres (526 hectares).
Beekeepers have been keeping up with that growth by providing an ever-increasing proportion of the nation’s available stock of hives.
This year, a survey of commercial beekeepers estimates that it will take 90 percent of honeybee colonies in the U.S. to pollinate all the almond orchards.
But bee populations are notoriously unstable, and they’ve been bedeviled by a host of problems, including loss of habitat, insecticides and disease.
The drought that gripped Western states last summer also weakened bee colonies, starving them of nutritious pollen and nectar from wildflowers.
When their honey production dropped, beekeepers must artificially supplement their diet with sugar solutions and pollen substitutes — and incur more costs.
For beekeepers the loss of a hive means the loss of income from honey production and future pollination, not to mention the expense of managing the hive throughout the year. They say they hardly break even.
“For every $210 paid to rent a beehive, we put close to that much into it the whole year feeding the bees because of drought. We do all the health checks, which is labor intensive, and we pay our workers full benefits,” Tauzer said.
A longtime pollinator broker suspects the thefts are happening because some beekeepers haven’t been able to deliver the healthy colonies they had promised to fulfill.
Some beekeepers are starting to equip hive boxes with GPS-enabled sensors. Others are tagging their boxes with clear liquid only visible under UV light, even through layers of paint, so that when thieves try to cover up the stolen boxes, police can determine who the rightful owner is.
The almond industry, meanwhile, is trying to avert a potential pollination crisis by growing so-called “self-compatible” almond varieties that require fewer honey bees for pollination and investing in research and other initiatives aimed at improving their health.