How to Steal 50M Bees | Hacker News Reader

How to Steal 50M Bees

bloomberg.com

134 pointssiberianbear64 comments

It would only take a very few GPS locaters between multiple bee keepers to lead law enforcement to the “chop shop”. The bee keeper association could choose bee keepers randomly. If the same insurance company insures multiple bee keepers, it might benefit them to GPS a few of their customers.

The amount of theft probably hasn't risen to that level yet. It's not so much the trackers, but who is going to track the trackers. They'd have to be on the case fast or risk the thieves removing the trackers.

Yes. Theft here in NZ has thieves specifically seeking out tracking systems (passive, like marked frames) scattering unwanted parts around paddocks and taking good frames only. Keep in mind that the honey frames have to be extracted, and these usually go to an extraction facility so they can notify people if suspicious. This happens frequently in NZ but our market would be far smaller. This part of the process is now requiring tracking here for quality control (quite how is a mystery to beekeepers) and do it wouldn’t be too hard to add a marker of ownership. Barcodes and QR codes are used on boxes and there is plenty of discussion about adding it to frames.

It’s too late once the hives have been gone long like in the article. No one in their right mind would want them back as the disease risk is far too great. American foul brood is cured by burning the gear.

I could see buying a bunch of cheap RFID tags and putting them in the frames. Drill a little hole, put it in, fill the rest with glue or epoxy so it is difficult to remove without obvious marks. They could just be a simple number progression that can be recorded in a log, nothing too fancy.

Those are used in NZ in a growing way (judging by beekeeper discussions only, no actual data). There is a new regulatory requirement to track boxes over the season and provide data on honey origin. There are a variety of low tech solutions, but some clever technical ones. Eg this one, that allows consumers to trace their own pot of honey. http://www.hivetech.nz/beekeepers-find

Like door locks, slowing thieves down would would have some value in itself.

The beekeeper in the article had 488 hives stolen in one night. That’s 488 hives the thieves would need to check. The GPS locators don’t “wake up” until theey detect motion so it’s not as simple as scanning them for a cell signal.

They could be modified to wake up on a timer, or to only transmit a burst at intervals ~ 6-12 hours.

The most effective method is probably to spend a couple hundred a night to hire a security guard to sit with the hives while they're all so concentrated.

The insurance company should help the beekeepers run a sting operation.

I'm assuming the pun was intentional, but well played regardless. Not least because a sting operation would seem like a sensible option.

If you're going to leave a bunch of $1500 hives in a field, wouldn't it make sense to hide trackers in some of them?

Netflix's Rotten S01E01 covers much of the same material.

Rotten is such a fantastic docu-series. Are you aware of any other similar shows?

Dirty Money is a similarly themed one about corruption -- the first season covered a great maple syrup heist, Allergan pharmaceuticals, a Payday loan criminal, HSBC's cartel connections, the VW NoX emissions scandal, and Trump's business career.

https://www.netflix.com/title/80118100

The maple syrup heist episode is amazing. I still can't believe that's real.

Let's say the amortized cost of a GPS tracker is, conservatively/high-end with a lifetime data plan for updates every hour: $100. Let's say the cost of mean average deployment is $10. Then the break-even point for hive theft is reached if losses are well over 7.33 (bar) %. (110/1500)

If losses are high, beekeepers will deploy them. If losses are low, deploying GPS would be more of a fear-based, emotional decision than a rational one.

Need only GPS trackers on a sample of the hives, no?

It depends on the distribution of thefts and % coverage.

If the losses are high enough, higher % of trackers would increase ROI (up to a point, depending if trackers were cheap enough). If losses are low enough or trackers very expensive, a few trackers here and there would insure against infrequent "cleaned out" thefts, e.g., serious illness healthcare insurance.

Only for that use case. From a logistics standpoint, which seems so important to the "modern beekeeper", it sounds like an easy thing to say yes to.

The question of "where are my bees?" can have a real-time answer and carries the benefit of knowing the temperature, humidity and other data available from remote sensors.

I have thought about the feasibility of an IOT beehive, maybe even with leaving/returning bees etc.

But the main issue would be the low profit of any individual hive. Save for some research projects, it wouldn't make sense economically.

Don't mobile radio signals disturb the bees? Maybe beehive trackers could use LoRa instead of 3G.

The other piece of the puzzle is how meaningful the loss is; if such a theft is existentially threatening, and there's a reasonable chance of it, then it may still be deployed despite not actually saving money.

Exactly. Expected payoff is only useful if you have infinite resources. This is why most of us pay for insurance even though in the long run it's guaranteed to cost more than just self-funding any repairs or replacements.

I mean, if you are at fault in an accident where several people sustain life-changing injuries, or your home is a total loss, or whatever, then you probably did end coming out ahead with the insurance. Insurance makes the most sense for perils which would be catastrophic for you.

It's insurance against beehive theft, not accident insurance. Are your company insurance policies sold in a package?

For the beekeeper in the story, it was catastrophic, in that it wiped out his chance for retirement, he said.

It's just an example.

in the long run it's guaranteed to cost more than just self-funding any repairs or replacements

If you're talking about home insurance then this is certainly not guaranteed. The primary purpose of home insurance is not in any case to safe you money on small repairs but to protect you from a total loss, say from fire.

Which is a short-run argument that does not refute GP’s point.

No need for lifetime data plan. You only equip some of the hives with trackers just when you're moving them to almond cultures where most thefts in the US occur.

Yes it seems like that episode of Rotten covers this exact story?

At least from what I remember it was about a hive owner from Montana (?) who transported his bees to CA.

A thief could try to track the tracker, and remove it or even just leave that hive behind.

Better still, jam all GPS, GNSS, GPRS and 3G and 4G signals, along with 2.4, 5 Ghz and LoRa bands just to be sure. Specialized car thieves are already doing it, hive thieves probably not yet. Tracking and removing the tracker is more difficult and can be done later.

Remote systems could throw an alert if the tracking devices go dark past a timeout period. At a minimum, authorities could be quickly alerted with the last known location of the hives.

I don’t think you can really do that. Jamming mostly targets a receiver. Disrupting the signal that’s emitted by a tracking device would make you really easy to triangulate and find.

No need for that either, you could just jam the GPS receiver.

Jamming the GPS receiver or anything else on site would trigger an alert. Then law enforcement has a very small amount of time to arrive at a very remote location...

Nearby cameras and distinctive frames (here are some pink ones https://www.ecrotek.co.nz/product/honeymaxtm-full-depth-pink...). Brand the frames, brand the box and lock the hell out of everything.

A fair portion of thefts have been performed by staff at companies too, so that’s worth keeping in mind. Also, get on with neighbours. Putting masses of hives up against a propert boundary, specifically to target Manuka that’s grown next door tends to rile people up.

Or left those frames in another hive, creating a chaos of crossed accusations.

Can we track all cell phones in the field? It might be easier to track thieves than hives.

Yup. Motion sensitive cameras, stamped frames with your details and the odd gps locator hidden in frames. It’s bad in New Zealand with the honey being very valuable (though less than half what the article cites, we use NZ dollars, which are worth half as much as US ones).

I love how-to articles, but I'm really hoping there will be a follow up that explains where to put the 50M bees after I've stolen them.

Best to keep them in a friend's closet until the whole thing blows over

I think this all changes in the nearish future.

In my line of work, we sell an extraordinary amount of hard drives to surveillance companies. As an old timer, I've seen this "edge of the wedge" happen twice before, and it feels that it is happening again. I feel that surveillance seems to be equivalent to the PC in 1985 or Smartphones in 2003. In other words, in the same way that society and business was changed forever by the PC or Smartphones, crime will be changed forever by real world tracking. If you lived through PCs or Smartphones, we all said it would change the world, but I think very few (Alan Kay as a prime exception) really internalized the obvious future.

The roadmap and growth of the commercial and consumer surveillance companies are absolutely extraordinary. And resolution x cameras x facial recognition = a future society where large things, such as packages in front of your door, bees in a field, or traffic accidents, will all be caught.

Within a decade, in the same situation where somebody steals a hive of bees, the people that picked up the hives will almost guaranteed to have evidence from a camera on a face or license plate or vehicle type creating probable cause, so you can get the phone records and coordinates of not only the people that picked up the hives but where they dropped them off. I just think it is going to be much easier to catch bad behavior and ensure punishment.

The real question to me is do we have a backlash against this similar to a GDPR? We see that laws are emerging to keep people from tracking us on the web. But will these types of laws be created so that we cannot track people in real life?

If society determines that crime is so bad that we allow real world tracking, what happens to crime? Once you know that any physical act in the open will get you caught, does the crime rate drop dramatically except for those that wish to be caught? Do we have a new breed of off the grid criminal? Or a breed of super hacker criminal that evolves to beat the system.

I think the most likely is that physical crime drops dramatically because everybody knows they will be caught.

As an anime fan, there was program called Psycho-pass. The tenant of the show was a technology that was developed so that any crime would quickly be caught. In many ways a robust surveillance system is this fiction brought to life. One of the most interested arcs (spoilers) is when the system is broken, and the current society is completely unable to deal with the criminals because they have become so naive because the crime rate is so low. I can actually see something like that happening in the future just with a robust surveillance system if society allowed it to happen.

Fun time to be alive, and I think we'll all see this story unfold in our life times.

I don't know that putting GPS responders will trigger any backlash. You don't need pervasive surveillance to track theft. Just lo-jack the hives at random.

I agree that a GPS solution would not trigger backlash. I just think that GPS are not cheap enough.

Lo/Jack is the perfect example. For around $1000, you could protect your $30K car. Sounds great doesn't it? Seems like everybody should want one. Actually, I don't know a single person that owns a Lo/Jack.

It turns out that Lo/Jack struggled for years. While pulling in revenue of a little over a $100M/Yr, it had seen a string of losses, and was eventually sold to CAMP a few years back. If Lo/Jack couldn't make a market work for a device to protect a $30K investment that is in everybody's driveway and a ready source of electricity to power the unit, I don't know anybody willing to do this for a bee hive. (Or perhaps this will be the next great kick-starter, and I'll eat my words!)

The key here is not "if" something like a Lo/Jack can be done, but at what point does it happen at such a low price any cover everything that you owns. Video Surveillance is approaching this point rapidly, and it not restricted, I think it will be another victim of Jevons Paradox.

If my deductible is $1000, then I only pay it if my car is stolen. It doesn't make sense to pay $1000 with certainty up front, even if it were to almost always prevent a loss in that case. Say there is a 1% chance of a car being stolen - why pay $1000 instead of $10, on average? It's not like I can avoid paying for comprehensive insurance because I have a Lojack, because there's still risk. I also have the impression that the police will not go and retrieve your car nor encourage you to do it, just because you have a tracking device.

The big picture, I think, is that the combination of insurance and law enforcement is cheaper for society than everyone having Lojacks, so we should be happy it's not economically viable even if it might be in a libertarian or anarchistic society.

I wonder if enough bees to pollinate the trees could survive on just being left alone in a almond orchard year round? The almond farms could have hives they leave in their orchards and don't extract the honey so the bees have lots of stored energy. This is the reason the bees make honey in the wild, a stored energy source. Hire a few bee keepers to keep an eye on things and fix problems. No moving around of diseases, stable source of bees, low cost? I know it is all the trend to outsource everything but bees seems pretty core to a fruit/nut tree operation.

In theory this sounds great. So I wonder why it's not implemented? Perhaps it results in lower profits for bee keepers since they have to bring up more hives to service the same number of customers?

Looks to me like the tradeoff is between hiring/paying local beekeepers to tend hives as needed year-round, or paying $200/hive to ship in hives from elsewhere during the flowering season. The latter probably ends up being less expensive, as long as there's enough supply.

It's too short of a season - few weeks. For the rest of the year, the bees will literally have nothing to forage on and when there is lack of forage, the queen will stop laying eggs, which will eventually lead to colony's death.

Almond trees produce no (or very little) nector. Older bees need that to live. Brood will eat pollen though.

Googling images of almond orchards, they look like deserts. There is nothing else anywhere near so bees wouldn’t be able to forage anything else to sustain them. Given the look of the land, these orchards are watered, and that must be a massive problem also.

But do they have to be deserts? Couldn't some kind of cover crop be useful both in terms of bee-feeding and in terms of reducing leeching of soil nutrients?

I think that's a great idea, but seems conflicting to the mindset that the almond farmers have (and most conventional farmers). That is, that's a more whole system mindset (see also permaculture) where farmers growing acres upon acres of just one crop (almonds, corn, soy) see it as discrete and disconnected from other crops and resources.

In the EU farmers are paid to leave wildlife-strips and beetle-banks in their fields. The almond mono-culture I saw on the Netflix series mentioned was shocking to me. It looks like one big drought could turn it into a dust bowl! Land is almost never left as bare soil in Britain due to our wet climate.

However before the EU paid for it, and rules were put in to stop removal of hedgerows, the UK was being carved into larger and larger fields of mono-culture cereals.

Ah that's very interesting! You might find Bill Mollison's "Global Gardener" series interesting.

No -- beehives rely on near-continuous nectar flow throughout spring and summer, and almonds don't produce enough for long enough to feed a hive.

It's never a surprise about the fact that scoundrels find their way into what's lucrative. It's surprising to find out the many ways an economy can find lucrative endeavors.

I think bee theft has happened in big cities like Chicago, Berlin and NYC beekeeping https://nycbeekeepers.blogspot.com/p/nyc-beekeeping-groups.h...

There's a few companies selling gps trackers for beehives.

https://findmyhive.com/ http://www.save-bees.com https://www.thebeecorp.com/qgps.html

$2.5M USD? Is it still 5 bees for a quarter?

Can we get the bees to defend themselves? Like if you pick up a hive incorrectly it breaks open?

Or spray dead bee pheromone on the thieves.

They do have beekeeping gear.

50M bees sounds dramatic but can be only one hive.

Happens a lot in Australia too (another poster mentioned NZ). Example: https://www.news.com.au/national/south-australia/18-stolen-b...

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