Lloyd Cunniff

It was so foggy the night they got stolen, you couldn't see 100 feet, so nobody would have even seen them.

In order to steal 700 and some colonies in one night, it took more than one truck and a couple guys on each truck. They weren't semis because there wasn't room to turn a semi around in there.

They had forklifts like mine because of the tracks they make in the mud.

I had one hive of bees left. I left one hive at home in Montana. The rest of them I sent down there and they stole them all. So I had to start over from scratch. 57 years old and I had to start over from scratch. I'm thinking about retiring. Now I gotta, there's no way I can retire.

I mean, it was just an unbelievable nightmare.

It was just a total nightmare. You know, hives tipped over and mixed together. Oh God, it was like a nightmare.

Okay.

The next night we had to go back to get the rest of it. And those guys had come in and stolen some of the stuff back again. Some of the stuff that I'd gone through and Mark was gone. Then the sheriffs, they found part of them again. They were stolen twice and recovered twice.

They're all back home. I was working on it today when he called me today. We got him back in pretty good shape.

Where we live in Montana is like the premium honey producing part of the United States for pounds per colony.

And I'm glad that I got to see it. And I call it the golden age of honey production because you couldn't do anything wrong. The weather was perfect. The bees were perfect.

And I figured, well, what's the chances? My number came up once that somebody else has turned me on.

Nowadays, the bees don't have that ability to bounce back. If anything bad happens to them, they're done.

Off of one semi-load, I can make $100,000. In two weeks. Two weeks, yeah.

I was so mad, yeah. I waited for like two hours for the sheriffs to show up. And I was on Facebook and I mouthed out, oh my God, it just blew up.

I drove around that morning, the hired man and I. Drove around and we stopped and talked to a couple different beekeepers that we saw working in the fields. Everybody that I talked to said, you'll never find them.

One kid I talked to said that he'd lost 300 colonies the year before and never saw anything of them.