Buzz Landon thought this year would be different. But on Jan. 30, he felt the sting of stolen property yet again. Save for a piece of honeycomb, a small wooden cage and some deep tire impressions, the thieves left no evidence of who they are — or where they had taken Buzz’s bees.
Luckily, he happens to know a man for the job.
“A lot of people have called me a bee theft detective,” said Dept. Rowdy Freeman, of the Butte County Sheriff’s Office. He’s investigated everything from fraud to homicide, but in recent years has become a specialist in this particular type of agricultural crime.
California’s $7.6 billion almond growing industry requires over two million bee colonies every year. Nearly two thirds of all American beekeepers send their hives to pollinate almond orchards in California’s Central Valley, for up to $350 each hive for the season.
Beekeepers from around the country lease their hives to almond farmers in for up to $350 per hive every February during pollination season. This, combined with the soaring cost of honey and demand for bees during almond pollination has created the golden opportunity for sticky-fingered criminals to cash out.
Two years ago, criminals stole more than 700 hives, worth just under $1 million. In the end, it was Deputy Freeman who managed to track the bee bandits down, using a very special set of skills, rooted in his own experiences as a beekeeper himself.
“I understand bees and the beekeeping industry and how it all works,” he said. “It’s something that needs special attention from someone and I’m glad that I can be there.”
It all started in 2014, when he was assigned his first bee theft case. Shortly after that he got the bug, and today he has more than 400 hives. He’s also made local connections with the beekeeping community, which has come in handy this year.
So far, more than 500 hives have already gone missing in the Central Valley in 2019, and Freeman is usually the first to know about it. But bee poachers are a tricky breed to catch.
Stealing millions of angry bees requires a deep knowledge of how to correctly handle the insects. Thieves break into the almond orchards under the dark of night, poaching freshly delivered hives. But this arduous task requires equipment unique to the beekeeping industry: A special beekeeping forklift or a flat bed to put the hives on, full beekeeper suits and hand-held smokers to subdue the bees. For that reason, Rowdy and the beekeeping community in general believe that other beekeepers are the main culprit.
“It's a hard crime to detect because they look like they're a beekeeper that owns the hives moving their own hives,” Freeman said.
VICE News embeds with Deputy Freeman through his investigative process, as he strikes gold busting a smaller theft operation in Biggs County.
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