Thieves are targeting beehives with growing sophistication | Hacker News Reader

Thieves are targeting beehives with growing sophistication

theguardian.com

92 pointsmchan34 comments

There's some good work being done in small niches on bees [0] [1] and others. Are any HN folks working on bee-focused projects that would give their work a shoutout? I'd love throw in on research, data collection or product development work using my own hives if teams are looking for help.

[0] https://apic.ai

[1] https://pollenity.com

edit - links

Thanks for the links, those projects look cool. I'm not a beekeeper, but one day I would like to become one. For now I'm just reading on the subject And of course I stmbled up on the mite problem.

Do you by any chance know of anyone doing something similar to this article [1] It's noted as WIP, but I didn't manage to find any follow up papers, or some open source projects doing something similar. apic.ai looks similar but I don't think it's using lasers to remove mites from them.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313808393_Basic_alg...

I don't know about removing mites.

From what I've seen the best practices are around ideas that seem like "the best defense is a good offense" -- or providing the bees the best possible chances and situation and letting them take care of themselves, which they do white well when fed a range of foods and not squeezed too tightly for profits and trucked across country.

Rev. Langstroth's work on this is dated ( 1850s and 1860s ) but still incredibly relevant. He's given a lot of credit for his work on moveable-frame hives, but 'd say he did a lot to advocate for the practice of bee keeping as a practice that could be engaged, as gardening, by anyone with interest.

No expert, but just happened to watch a video this morning.

According to a talk by Paul Stamets [1], common viruses transmitted from mites to bees may be managed better by adding mushroom derivatives to sugar water feed.

[1] Paul Stamets: Mycology and Mushrooms as Medicines https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q0un2GPsSQ

Heard the same story from a beekeeper in Poland. Some assholes are actually stealing other beekeepers' hives.

Are there any affordable tracking devices with long battery life (a few months) available that could be used to track down the thieves?

You could use a beep device, if they still exist. It uses LORA and can last for 10 years on a battery.

And mark a few bees would not do any harm. Would made slightly easier to find the colony later in some backyard. Workers have short lives sadly but marking queens with a number in torax is easy and feasible and the mark will last for several years. Queen and colony are the same thing, stolen colonies could be easily identified just looking at the queen.

Is not a new technology. Microfilms and microfilm viewers exist since decades so the solution is available

What about the queen?

So, we need some government inspector to find and examine all the millions of hives everywhere, in case one of them was stolen? How often would these inspections be carried out? Who will pay for them? Will the inspectors have the right to enter any private property at any time to verify there are no hives anywhere? What about feral colonies: are property owners responsible if a stolen colony swarms on their land?

I think there are some practical problems with this suggestion.

Is an interesting question. Should we pursue criminals responsible of repeated damages by several hundred thousands dollars?

Well, maybe not.

This is expensive and makes you sweat. Policemen entering in private properties at any time... that's super annoying for the owners of the amphetamine labs.

Professional beekeepers could have a different opinion about that. Is a regulated economic activity valued in a few millions of dollars, and this people pay taxes also. The owner of the pink panther diamond is not the only one paying taxes here.

> Will the inspectors have the right to enter any private property at any time to verify there are no hives anywhere?

Lets assume that the government has a reasonable suspicion than lots of valuable stolen property are being stored in some place. What would they do currently?

Is not necessarily a blind shot. I assume that in theory you could triangulate stolen beehives if you mark the queens and some workers a few days before to move your 200 beehives to a new place just in case.

No, but it's possible to do. They need to be working only for some period after disturbing. Because beehive is stationary, it can use mechanical tilt switch, which enables device only when hive is moved. My beekeeping friend uses cheap rfid tags inlayed inside hive walls to easily identify that beehive is his, in case of needing to quickly check it. If he thinks someone stole the hive, it's quick to bring phone near known location on hive and confirm it. Gps trackers for each hive are still too expensive.

If you read the article, it's clear that wouldn't help much as the thieves are quickly breaking down the hives and reboxing the bees. The original beehives are discarded.

A system that would make a phone call based in an acelerometer inside the beehive would deserve a look at least.

If you can be notified as soon as thieves are breaking/moving hives, that would help immensely.

There is huge risk asymmetry here. If the police weren’t incompetent it would be trivial to set up a sting (ha!) operation or three to catch most of the criminals operating in an area.

> It’s frustrating because it’s getting harder and harder to keep bees alive.

this seems to be the real problem

Can one breed bees? I wonder if we could selectively breed pesticide resistance.

The honeybee is a domesticated species, and there are breeding programs set on making honeybees more resistant to the mite and virus that are often the cause of colony collapse. It's a tricky process though.

My guess is that genetic engineering of the bees or their microbiome will end up being the solution.

Or we can just let them all become africanized...

genuinely curious: how will africanization help?

Africanized bees are more hearty to mites and disease.

Are they also domesticated though?

No, and they can be pretty dangerous.

Resistant to mites, they seem to have improved ability to forage, etc.

A lot of beekeepers have hybridized African bee hives. They can be more aggressive, so wear a suit and avoid irritating the hive too much and you’ll be fine.

According to wikipedia, africanized bees are already the bee of choice in Brazil.

From what I understand, if you took away how dangerous they can be then they dominate the western honeybee in every regard.

I found the line in Wikipedia that makes the claim that "The Africanized bee is considered the bee of choice for beekeeping in Brazil" and the source seems to be a 2009 paper from volume 23 of the journal "Brazilian Journal of Agricultural Research" (Pesquisa Agropecuária Brasileira) which doesn't exist as volume 23 was in 1988 (see http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_issues&pid=0100-2... ).

There was a link on HN a few months ago discussing a new strain of bees [0] being bred up in Canada that are supposedly much more resistant to some of the mites and diseases that are commonly affecting hives. As far as pesticides go, though, I'd imagine that it's going to be pretty hard to develop an insect that isn't affected by chemicals carefully engineered to affect insects; we're going to have to shift away from using these sorts of treatments, neonicotinoids especially, in our agriculture.

[0] http://www.saskatraz.com/index.htm

Iirc they tried to create a mixed breed with africanized bees which are supposed to be much more hearty. But I think the problem was that they don't mix well the stronger just takes over the weaker.

We've been breeding bees for millennia. Maybe 7000 years or so. We're pretty good at it.

Honeybees are domesticated animals, like dairy cows. When we need more, we breed more. There's no threat to domestic honeybees as a species or even as an industry. Unlike the native bees, which are being threatened by introduced diseases (both from non-native introduced species like honeybees, and through bulk imports of honey from other continents), encroachment of non-native species (did you know native bees in North America can't pollinate European or Asian flowers?), and possibly pesticides.

I lose hives every year (from winterkill to bear attacks and my own stupidity). A new nuc ("starter pack") is about $300. It would be cheaper and easier to steal from my neighbours, except I have morals.

Record numbers of bees died last winter, and we've continued to do nothing to address the problem: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/06/19/733761393/mo...

Who is this we who's not doing anything to address the problem? There are quite a few people working on solutions to this problem:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/07/breeders-toughen-bee...

https://www.genengnews.com/news/honey-bee-microbiome-bacteri...

https://beecare.bayer.com/media-center/news/detail/a-new-way...

https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2019/05/30/program-to-help-mi...

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/victory-for...

As a bee owner myself (as a hobby), the reality is usually 33% of hives don’t make it Through the winter. This was known back in the 70’s and probably much further (I have a book from then which covers the subject of bee keeping).

From the linked article - 40% seems a tad higher, but if you don’t over winter the bees, have a tough year, w.e. You run a risk.

IMO one of the big issues is lack of biodiversity. Bees need pollen and if they collect pollen from almond fields only, they might not have enough stores because they only bloom for a specific time of year. Further, bees need ready access to water, which deserts / bees on the road dont provide.

Finally, yes pesticides are likely a problem, but again that’s because we are bringing bees to a farm which sprays the stuff.

Bee theft has a long history, with even Plato talking about it. (Laws 8.843d-e)

>And if any, yielding to his taste of bees, secures for himself another man's swarm by attracting them with the rattling of pans, he shall pay for the damage.

I predict an FBI sting operation soon

need to lojack the hives

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