AGRICULTURE: Inland beekeepers getting stung by hive thefts

July 28--Of all the things a person could steal, a box of potentially angry honeybees might seem like an undesirable target.

Unless, of course, the thief is a beekeeper.

In California, bee rustlers are making off with hundreds of hives at a time, and beekeepers say the bad guys are other beekeepers. Most of them, it appears, are getting away with it.

A recent bee caper in Riverside County ended not with arrests but in a lawsuit.

The plaintiffs are alleging a sheriff's investigator was hoodwinked into helping a known bee thief, "the Jesse James of the beehive industry," steal their bees from a San Jacinto-area watermelon farm.

Jack Wickerd, a Menifee resident whose family has been in the beekeeping business for many years, said the culprits are coming from inside the industry but they aren't what he considers legitimate beekeepers.

"It's ones on the fringes," he said. "They're just making a quick buck."

Because bee boxes usually are left unattended among crops or at other remote locations, they are an easy target for thieves who know how to handle bees.

"For the most part, beekeepers are pretty honest people," said Alan Mikolich, of Mikolich Family Honey in Temecula.

But for some, he said, the temptation is too great.

"At almond time, you could pick up a hundred hives and get $15,000 just moving them 10, 20 miles away and putting them in somebody's orchard," Mikolich said.

BIG DEMAND FOR BEES

Beekeepers say thefts have spiked as the price growers pay to rent hives during the almond bloom has more than doubled since the mid-2000s. Beekeepers are now getting up to $200 per hive.

The increase is driven by competing trends. There are fewer bees than there used to be -- a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder has led to mass die-offs over the past decade. Meanwhile, California's almond acreage has exploded, increasing the demand for bees.

It takes some 1.5 million hives to pollinate California's more than 800,000 acres of almond trees. The state's beekeepers can't begin to meet that demand. Most of the commercial hives in the United States, hauled cross-country on trucks, converge on the Central Valley for the bloom, which begins each year in February and lasts just a few weeks.

Statistics on bee theft are hard to come by, but beekeepers, speaking anecdotally, say the Central Valley is ground zero. One beekeeper there lost 570 hives to thieves this year in one fell swoop. Inland area beekeepers have lost hives in the Central Valley, as well as at home.

Wickerd said 180 to 200 of his hives turned up missing in Bakersfield last year, and he later found them in an almond grove. He said a man who had worked for him had taken his bees and removed the identifying marks -- known as brands -- on the boxes.

The man wasn't prosecuted, he said, because authorities didn't think they could prove the bees were stolen.

"He's a small-time beekeeper," Wickerd said. "His bees probably died so he was trying to replace them to keep his numbers up."

Mikolich said there was a rash of thefts in the rural De Luz area near Temecula a few years ago.

"Somebody drove in and took the bees off the pallets and carried them away," he said. "There were two or three hundred stolen within the period of about a month, but they couldn't prove anything. Nobody saw anything. I don't even know if the sheriffs got notified. All they could do is go off tire tracks."

In another case, about 100 hives belonging to a De Luz beekeeper were stolen out of an orchard near the Central Valley town of Wasco one night. The sheriff's department came out the next day and took a report. A few days later, Mikolich said, "they came back and took another hundred."

Mikolich said he had heard of one wild case in the Mentone area in which a beekeeper who caught someone stealing his hives under cover of darkness supposedly shot out the thieves' tires when they tried to drive away.

Officials with the sheriff's departments in both Riverside and San Bernardino counties said they don't track bee thefts and were not aware of bee theft reports, aside from the recent case involving the lawsuit.

Gene Brandi, a Los Banos beekeeper with the California State Beekeepers Association, said the organization offers $10,000 rewards for information leading to the conviction of bee thieves.

"We haven't paid out a reward for several years because nobody gets convicted," he said.

When hives are stolen, usually they're never found.

"They just disappear," Brandi said.

Even when they do turn up, it can be difficult to make a case. Many beekeepers don't follow the rules for marking their boxes and keeping sales records. Likewise, equipment changes hands so often it can be hard to determine the rightful owners.

Brandi said he knows of an incident in which Central Valley bee thieves were caught with the boxes on their truck but talked their way out of it, saying they were just workers and had mistakenly loaded the wrong bees.

In a rare case this year, a man was arrested after a beekeeper posing as an almond grower discovered his stolen bee boxes in what he described as a "chop shop" for bees, Brandi said.

Deputy Corey Stacey, a rural crimes investigator with the Kern County Sheriff's Office, agreed that bee thefts can be tough to crack, particularly if the bees are separated from the original equipment.

"Do you have tracking devices on them? Do you have DNA? No. You can't say, 'Oh, this bee belongs to this beekeeper.'"

Though prosecutions are rare, Brandi said he thinks more and more people appreciate that bee theft is no laughing matter.

"I think, by and large, the general public, including law enforcement, are more cognizant of the fact that bees are ... a valuable part of our agricultural economy and our ecosystem. They realize that it's tough to keep bees alive, that a lot of bees have been dying. So they are not as nonchalant about it as maybe they were 20 years ago."

The bee theft that prompted the lawsuit against the Riverside County Sheriff's Department underscores the challenges of a bee rustling investigation.

Investigator Steven Grassel chronicled his efforts in a 21-page police report replete with technical beekeeping terminology and conflicting accounts of who bought what bee equipment when.

It all started when David Allred, of Riverside, reported in December 2012 that some of his bees had been stolen from Moreno Valley. His insurance company reimbursed him more than $23,000 for the theft, but he continued to look for his missing bees, according to the report.

Months later, he called the Sheriff's Department to say he'd found his bees on a watermelon farm near Gilman Springs and the 79. According to the report, the insurance company had agreed to sell the bees back to Allred at a much discounted rate if they were recovered.

Deputies didn't take action until Allred complained again. In December 2013, he accompanied Grassel to the watermelon farm where he claimed he had seen his stolen bees. They went onto the property after getting permission from the farmer and found several frames that had Allred's name and serial number on them, along with many that did not.

According to Grassel's report, he and Allred returned to the farm a short time later and hauled away 160 hives after the insurance company representative agreed to take responsibility for them until the investigation ended. The insurance company immediately turned the hives over to Allred.

Meanwhile, Jeff Olney and Gary Manning, the beekeepers from the watermelon farm, were trying to prove the bees in question were their rightful property. They sent the investigator receipts for the equipment -- and also a stack of newspaper clippings about Allred.

Allred, when he was 23, had been sentenced to prison in a 1976 theft of $10,000 worth of beehives and equipment, saying in open court that he "wanted to be known as the Jesse James of the beehive industry," the Riverside Daily Enterprise and other newspapers reported at the time. The case drew attention because Allred was reportedly the first bee rustler to garner a state prison term.

Allred also had been convicted of possession of stolen property in connection with the theft of 400 hives in Colton and felony vandalism for poisoning more than 600 hives of a competitor in Oxnard.

"The most basic investigation by the Sheriff's Department would have revealed this information," the beekeepers' lawsuit says.

After learning of Allred's checkered history in the bee industry, Grassel consulted an investigator with the Riverside County agricultural commissioner's office who told him Allred "is not a person to be trusted," and that she couldn't believe he had convinced Grassel to get involved in the case, the police report says.

Weeks later, after perusing receipts and interviewing beekeepers, Grassel concluded that he couldn't prove the bee boxes had been stolen from Allred and ordered them returned to Olney and Manning.

But by then, many of the boxes were missing and those that remained were in poor condition.

In May, Olney and Manning sued the Sheriff's Department, Allred and his insurance company alleging their bees, worth thousands of dollars, were taken unlawfully and destroyed.

"They put the fox in charge of the hen house by turning these bees over to Allred," said attorney Frank Marchetti, who is representing Olney and Manning in their lawsuit.

The Sheriff's Department declined to discuss the case because of the suit.

Repeated efforts to reach Allred for comment were unsuccessful. Olney and Manning, through their attorney, also declined to comment.

Marchetti said Olney got into beekeeping several years ago and last year began working with Manning. The two had invested $250,000 or more in the business, Marchetti said. The suit alleges their business was set back three years and nearly destroyed by the investigation. The seizure of their bees caused them to lose a valuable five-year contract to provide 450 hives for almond pollination, the suit says.

"They're doing their best to revive their business," Marchetti said

Their lawsuit accuses sheriff's officials of acting as accessories to a crime.

"They took Allred at his word," the complaint says, aiding and abetting him in what the suit describes as the theft of the plaintiffs' bees.

Marchetti said his clients believe Grassel assumed they were guilty because they both have previous felony convictions unrelated to beekeeping. He faulted the investigator for not doing a proper background check of Allred, not obtaining a search warrant for the hives and for failing to ensure the bees would be secured and properly cared for after they were seized.

"I do think that the police feel they were taken advantage of," Marchetti said. "If Detective Grassel was doing his job in the first place, this wouldn't have happened."

Michele Tracy, the agricultural commissioner's investigator, said she sympathized with the difficulties Grassel encountered on the case. Beekeeping records are often woefully inadequate, she said. When her own department receives complaints from residents about beekeeping operations, she and her colleagues often struggle just to track down the owners of the bees.

When Grassel came to see her about the Allred case, she said, he seemed to be working hard to get a handle on it.

"It was a real mess for the detective to even remotely sort out who was telling the truth," she said. "It's kind of a crazy business."

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Contact the writer: 951-368-9694, [email protected]

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