Brad Poile was met with an unpleasant post-Christmas surprise when checking his beehives in the Benandarah State Forest, just north of Batemans Bay on the NSW South Coast, last month.Beekeepers are being advised to add GPS trackers and cameras to their hivesExpecting to find several boxes of hives side-by-side, he instead found they had been ransacked, and seven hives were missing.
As a third-generation beekeeper, his family had never been confronted with a theft quite like this before where someone has "taken everything that they could get their hands on".The NSW South Coast police district has deployed its rural crime prevention team to investigate the theft, which is believed to have occurred sometime in mid-December.
"People vandalise the bees by running over them with four-wheel drives, or just tipping them over," he said.Mr Kershaw advised beekeepers to invest in tighter security measures such as GPS trackers that can be added to hives and CCTV on private properties to monitor for thefts.
Luckily a new bee vaccine has been developed 🤡🤡
need a teeny tiny spray can to tag a bee.
Show me the honey!
Bee ware of thieves.