Farmers Feel The Sting Of Bee Rustlers -- California's New Outlaws
YOLO COUNTY (KPIX 5) -- It's a crime straight out of the wild west with a with a California twist. Bee rustlers have become the state's new outlaws. It's the farmers who are getting stung.
The gentle hum of bees is music to farmers in California's heartland. Farmers do the planting but bees are the key to their crop's success.
Farmers know it, and in Yolo County, so do criminals. One good hit, and the bad guys can net $350-$600 in just one minute.
In the middle of night, thieves steal boxes of bees in hopes of renting them out to farmers as their own for thousands of dollars, or starting their own colonies.
How do they get away with it? Sometimes thieves are experienced bee keepers. In the eyes of the victims, they are cruel. They roll up and rip the bees from their homes ruthlessly.
"Sometimes they use a forklift," says Henry Harland, a bee farmer in Yolo county. He says mistreating bees is against beekeeper code.
He points to the small numbers marked on the frame of one of the boxes teeming with bees in his apiary. They are the only form of branding for bees. Brandon says thieves can just scratch them off.
Sometimes bees are relocated, making it difficult to track them down and catch the criminals.
"If you don't catch them red-handed it's pretty hard," says Harland. "Once the frames are in another box, once they shake the bees out, if there's no proof, no finger prints, there's really no way to tell where they went."
So far Harland's been lucky. That's not the case for his fellow farmers, though.
So, why the rash of bee thefts?
Henry blames the high cost of renting bees to pollinate the almond crops.
It takes more than a million bee colonies to keep California's annual almond crop going. That's more than any crop in the country.
According to government agricultural data, the cost of renting honey bee hives for almond pollination rose from about $50 per hive in 2003, to $150-$200 per hive in 2014.
"The price of rent for almond pollination -- this is the time of year when the theft starts."
Two years ago, another Yolo County farmer got hit hard. A man named Viktor Zhdamirov was convicted of stealing $65,000 worth of the farmer's bees.
Martha Holzafpel was the prosecuting attorney in the case.
"Some of the colonies had to be destroyed," she told KPIX 5. "They were so infected they couldn't come back."
She says Zhdamirov was a bee farmer himself. He became upset because some of his bees migrated to the farmer's healthier colony, so decided to steal them back. He was found guilty.
No penalty is enough in Harland's opinion. This kind of crime doesn't just affect him.
"It affects my whole family, because my whole family works for the company."
