Seriously, though, beehive theft may sound funny, but to the beekeepers it’s the most serious thing in the world because that’s their entire livelihood. It’s easy to see why they’d be targeted, though. As we’ve mentioned before, beekeepers can make a sweet profit in California, where the thefts have become such a problem, some police officers now specialize in “hive crime.” That’s why they call them the “fuzz.” They probably organize a lot of sting operations. (Look, unless someone tells us to stop, we’ll keep doing this forever.)
The thefts usually look the same. The beekeepers unload their hives in a new location for temporary storage and come back the next day to see them aggressively not being there. One investigation into one such theft led the police to a field that looked like a bee chop shop. There were about 2,500 hives there belonging to different owners, which someone hacked up and mix-and-matched to create new colonies. This is not something that you can do with no training, by the way, which is why beehive thefts are very often perpetrated by other beekeepers or on their bee-half. (See, you’re booing us, but you would have done the same thing.)
Things have gotten so bad that the police and beekeepers have partnered up with companies that normally work to prevent big-game poaching. They’ve come up with a few ideas like microchipping the hive pallets, installing wildlife cameras, or marking the hives with a special liquid that gets easily on the skin and clothes, is impossible to wash off, and is only visible under UV light. Publicly sentencing the thieves to the bee torture from Nic Cage’s Wicker Man has also been proposed (by us, just now.) But this isn’t purely an American problem, as hive thefts have also been occurring in France. That’s because bees are big business all over the world. In fact…