Melissa Waage's Blog
Black market bees
March 12, 2008
Posted by Melissa Waage in Health and the Environment
If someone offers to sell you a beehive out of the back of a truck this spring, do not buy it, even if it’s a really good deal. Because those bees may be hot.
That’s right—the law of supply and demand has created conditions favoring rampant bee theft.
Beekeepers hire out their hives each year to growers who need to get their crops pollinated. A shortage of bees means the price of pollination goes up. For example, after heavy over-winter bee losses in the spring of 2005, fees for pollinating California’s almond crop nearly tripled. In California, Colony Collapse Disorder is contributing to a bee shortage that has driven the cost of renting a hive to $200 in some places—four times the cost four years ago. And that’s provided a strong incentive for stealing bees. The Associated Press reports,
As the price of pollination soars, each hive becomes a sitting gold mine, sheriff's deputies say. Skilled criminals simply dump the colony into a new container, and rent the bees to farmers as their own, pocketing the fee they're paid for pollination.
California beekeepers have lost $330,000 in the recent rash of thefts. Apparently some of them are even installing traceable microchips into their hives to foil bee thieves.
But bee-related crime will be the least of our worries if the honey bee decline continues, with managed bees contributing $14 billion to American agriculture each year, and some crops--like almonds and blueberries--almost completely dependent on honey bee pollination. It’s clearly imperative to get to the root of Colony Collapse Disorder and make the world safer for bees.
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