Beekeepers hit hard by thefts of hives | Hacker News Reader

Beekeepers hit hard by thefts of hives

nationalgeographic.com

145 pointsgscott49 comments

What about a radioactive tracer, that is sprayed on the bees, you can make the tracers fairly unique and then if there is a dispute the tracer can be analysed from a bee?

Also a Vice news article with Buzz Landon and Officer Freeman busting a bee thief

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z7Te9mqO8o

California already makes you post warnings about the most miniscule concentrations of, heaven forbid, "chemicals". You think this would be ok? Much less, understood and accepted by uninformed consumers??

I mean everything already has a cancer warning on it. Consumers just blow it off.

Or maybe some of the "DNA" sprays they use to mark thieves in supermarkets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartWater

Or hide an arduino with a smoke grenade attachment inside the hive.

There is smoke everywhere already when a big operation is underway. And it tends to be out in the middle of nowhere.

We keep bees at our farm Guatemala. Once every couple months our hives are raided. We've set up motion-activated lights and other deterrents but the fact that hives are generally further removed from where people live makes them a very easy target.

Consider barbed wire around them, or even electrified fencing if you have power nearby.

Would be interesting if you had an alarm that released the "alarm pheromone" that makes honey bees angry.

Sounds like a booby trap, which would carry some nasty liability here in the states.

That is true, but they would have to prove that the bees were agitated because of the pheromone and not because they were being stolen/handled incorrectly. All while admitting they committed a crime of course.

Wonder if it would be economical to put a gps tracker at the bottom of every hive box.

It wouldn't even have to be every hive, just every second or even third. Enough to point to the thief and arrest him. Unless we're talking about thieves which only steal one hive at a time. I also doubt they're selling those hives immediately and each to different buyer.

Alternatively, you could have an alarm system which turns on the light (so bees can fly) and sounds the most obnoxious car horn possible, to make bees defend themselves.

Site are usually remote, visited infrequently, and contain many hives. They are usually sunny which may help charge batteries, but this needs to be hidden. You could have a gps in the pallet rather than the hive, so the cost goes down per hive. However tracking really needs to be per frame. Some countries require a degree of tracking already as part of their food safety regulations. The ultimate would be a rfid per honey frame, a beekeeper notification if a hive was opened and a gps signal for location. Some operations and placing cameras that are motion activated near access to their sites. This is possibly more helpful.

The GPS tracker can't be easily removed or the thieves would simply remove it. Ideally it's located inside each hive so that you can't reach it without disturbing the bees.

If they're on the pallet, the thieves will simply move the hives off the pallet and onto their own. The thieves have already proven to be highly informed about the market so they will know how the GPS trackers work.

I mean these operations already involve heavy equipment and some basic "farmer" mechanical hacker knowledge which is usually quite impressive.

It's not really that hard or expensive to create a faraday cage trailer, or simply jam GPS/Cellular (assuming pre-knowledge of the types of trackers used) until you can safely remove the devices. I think it's a good idea to put one in every 10th hive just to make things harder and raise the cost of the theft, but I doubt it would really have a large effect on these operations past the first bust you get using the technology.

Cameras and and various real-time alerts (wireless) on access roads and around the site are probably going to be a lot more effective as deterrents in the long view. Hard to evade a few motion detectors even if you know they exist, so long as you were not the one placing them.

This of course assumes law enforcement response times are reasonable - if you get an alert that the site is being disturbed and you confirm on your hidden camera, the police still need to get there within 15-30 minutes to have a hope of catching anyone remotely prepared.

Article says they cost $180 each which is about 18% of the value of hive. Not many security systems I can think of that are that expensive relative to what they're securing.

I was wondering about those valuations. $1000 per hive is a lot. A top condition Manuka hive here in New Zealand wouldn’t get particularly close to half that.

It sounds like the hives are usually stolen en masse, so you could randomly place trackers in a subset of the hives to reduce cost.

Edit: $130

Since everybody is throwing out ideas mine would be:

1- Put up fake cameras with fake antennas prominently displayed, blinking light included. Include a fake solar panel. Can be obtained for a few dollars. Include a prominent sign that all activities are being recorded by covert and overt security measures.

2- Have a drone make regular trips to photograph the area. I know some company sells drones that can be programmed to do certain activities routinely and to charge themselves autonomously and thus limiting human involvement. Have prominent sign detailing that area is being protected by camera and drone surveillance, covert and overt.

3- Put up a real hidden solar powered video camera with motion detection. Have also some fake ones prominently displayed.

The problem is that the adversaries are themselves beekeepers or former beekeepers. Fake measures are unlikely to work since the thieves won't be fooled - you have to assume the thieves know almost as much about the countermeasures as the beekepers themselves do.

Your ideas are basically assuming that the thieves are amateurs, and amateurs that know nothing about beekeeping aren't going to be able to effectively monetize the bees they steal anyway.

It’s hard - many moves are done at night and operators are covered in their PPE. Many sites (where I am) are in extremely dense bush. Cameras on access roads are probably more likely to help.

It should be, given the potential loss is about a Grand per hive:

"We estimate about a $1,000 per hive — which includes the cost of the future pollination, the honey crop, packaged bees as well," said John Klepps, a hive quality assurance manager with Olivarez Honey Bees.

Heard of GPS jammer?

I have a feeling people who steal bees for a living might not be the most technically savvy people.

You’d be wrong.

Here in NZ it’s being done cleverly. Hitting an apiary and opening hives to take the best frames and switching in drawn comb. Branded frames are left. Tech solutions have been spotted and avoided.

It just leaves the site looking poor, not robbed.

More than likely the thieves are people who have worked in the industry so they know how a typical apiary operates and what common security measures are being used. Like any professional, professional criminals focus on crimes that fit their skill set to minimize legal risk and maximize profit. I'm not saying that people who are stealing bees are ignorant or inept. Obviously they're good at what they do or it wouldn't be a problem but we shouldn't assume they're good at all criminal activities. No matter what security measures you take there's always going to be ways to bypass it. Security measures are never a solution to threats but part of a process to minimize the threat. Something like GPS trackers can obviously be defeated but would help mitigate the threat of less skilled apiary thieves thriving on the low hanging fruit of unprotected apiaries. Getting caught using a GPS jammer carries a severe criminal punishment, far worse than just stealing bees. It's a high risk crime that requires technical expertise with major repercussions if you get caught. Criminals that have that level of technical expertise would probably concentrate on more profitable crimes than stealing bees. The goal is to increase the risk of the crime to help minimize the number of people who would attempt it, then concentrate on the few who's left. Security is an often vague process but this is how all security systems work.

They don't have to know how any of it works, they just have to buy one on a chinese website and plug it into their 12v car port

You could setup an alert where if the signal is lost for greater then x amount of time or the gps tracker moves more than 10ft set off an alert. You don’t necessarily need to track the boxes once the theft occurs if it’s enough to prevent it.

They are called anti-trackers on banggood.

In Switzerland you can buy a box and a starter wild bee population, let them multiply for the year, and then return them. Farmers then in turn purchase these wild bees from the company.

Repeat.

https://wildbieneundpartner.ch/patenschaft/

"Half the Rakkars’ 2,000 acres are planted with almonds, and the rest with a mix of pistachios and raisins."

I thought raisins were dried grapes... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Presumably those planted grapes are predestined to become raisins, with different growing and harvesting techniques than grapes used for other purposes, so it's not too unreasonable to refer to them by a name that encodes that info. Would be interested to hear from a raisin/grape farmer, though.

There are specific varieties of grape that are grown to be turned into varieties of raisins.

It's probably right next to the pasture where they raise grass-fed beef.

Hit hard? Surely "stung"...

That pun is used later on in the article as one of the sub-headings

It’s an industry requirement unfortunately. Bad puns, cute bee cartoons, hexagons and extra ‘z’s all over the place.

Ecological collapse in action.

I feel like someone who steals crops is a thief. Someone who steals the seeds is in some other category that I can't quite place. People stealing bees are in this group.

It’s still just theft. The bees have a market value with some connection to the present value of what they produce (a series of honey deposits and more bees.) It’s the same as if cattle were stolen from a dairy farm.

I don't mind stealing bread from the mouths of decadence. But we don't get that decadence without seeds...

*mouths of decadence

Crap. Well my comment is much less clever now. Thank you.

Why is stealing a sack of seeds in a different category than stealing a sack if carrots?

It's like getting to the heart of the matter: the hard kernel, as it were. Stealing from the hardworking proletariat their tools of production, not just the product. Unplanted seeds are less well grounded, less down to earth, more compact and mobile, more pregnant with potential. Ripe for transformation in to a deniable alternate assets as nuts to butter. Regardless, having all your bees in one basket isn't the smartest strategy.

Uh... So uh... I just this moment saw this (and NOT that) over on reddit, posted 23 hours ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/bk9pp9/til_t...

"TIL the larger a bee hive grows, the more efficient it becomes. A hive containing 30,000 bees produces 150% more honey than two hives of 15,000."

However, removed as "inaccurate".

Edit:

Points back to this article here, dated April 18, 2013: http://www.groworganic.com/organic-gardening/articles/meet-t...

Edit 2: Reddit comments seem worth reading; but to me it would seem advisable to sort the comments by "New".

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