[jansan]

Heard the same story from a beekeeper in Poland. Some assholes are actually stealing other beekeepers' hives.

Are there any affordable tracking devices with long battery life (a few months) available that could be used to track down the thieves?

[yetihehe]

No, but it's possible to do. They need to be working only for some period after disturbing. Because beehive is stationary, it can use mechanical tilt switch, which enables device only when hive is moved. My beekeeping friend uses cheap rfid tags inlayed inside hive walls to easily identify that beehive is his, in case of needing to quickly check it. If he thinks someone stole the hive, it's quick to bring phone near known location on hive and confirm it. Gps trackers for each hive are still too expensive.

[eschneider]

If you read the article, it's clear that wouldn't help much as the thieves are quickly breaking down the hives and reboxing the bees. The original beehives are discarded.

[pvaldes]

A system that would make a phone call based in an acelerometer inside the beehive would deserve a look at least.

[yetihehe]

If you can be notified as soon as thieves are breaking/moving hives, that would help immensely.

[sneak]

There is huge risk asymmetry here. If the police weren’t incompetent it would be trivial to set up a sting (ha!) operation or three to catch most of the criminals operating in an area.

[GrumpyNl]

You could use a beep device, if they still exist. It uses LORA and can last for 10 years on a battery.

[pvaldes]

And mark a few bees would not do any harm. Would made slightly easier to find the colony later in some backyard. Workers have short lives sadly but marking queens with a number in torax is easy and feasible and the mark will last for several years. Queen and colony are the same thing, stolen colonies could be easily identified just looking at the queen.

Is not a new technology. Microfilms and microfilm viewers exist since decades so the solution is available

[bregma]

So, we need some government inspector to find and examine all the millions of hives everywhere, in case one of them was stolen? How often would these inspections be carried out? Who will pay for them? Will the inspectors have the right to enter any private property at any time to verify there are no hives anywhere? What about feral colonies: are property owners responsible if a stolen colony swarms on their land?

I think there are some practical problems with this suggestion.

[pvaldes]

Is an interesting question. Should we pursue criminals responsible of repeated damages by several hundred thousands dollars?

Well, maybe not.

This is expensive and makes you sweat. Policemen entering in private properties at any time... that's super annoying for the owners of the amphetamine labs.

Professional beekeepers could have a different opinion about that. Is a regulated economic activity valued in a few millions of dollars, and this people pay taxes also. The owner of the pink panther diamond is not the only one paying taxes here.

> Will the inspectors have the right to enter any private property at any time to verify there are no hives anywhere?

Lets assume that the government has a reasonable suspicion than lots of valuable stolen property are being stored in some place. What would they do currently?

Is not necessarily a blind shot. I assume that in theory you could triangulate stolen beehives if you mark the queens and some workers a few days before to move your 200 beehives to a new place just in case.

[ant6n]

What about the queen?