Shadowy thieves, suspicious rivals, a criminal investigation, and unsuspecting fall guys—the hallmarks of a classic heist. But this time, the prize isn’t cash or jewels. It’s millions of bees. Big Time is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Piece of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.apple.co/BigTimePod
Chapter 1: How do you steal 50 million bees?
Steve Buscemi here. This is Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions. Today, we ask an age-old question. How do you steal 50 million bees? My guess would have been a really, really big net. It turns out it's a lot more complicated than that. Sam Mullins has our story today about a lot of missing bees. Music
We've all seen beekeepers tending to hives in their beekeeping suits. I always assumed that as the beekeeper walked among the hives and started pulling screens full of honeycomb, that the suit was the only thing standing between the beekeeper and a thousand angry stingers. That once the hive is opened, all the bees think they're under attack and launch a counteroffensive.
But I've learned it's not like that. Bees only sting when they need to. when they get pinched, when they feel that the hive is under attack, or when they're not getting what they need. When the honey is flowing and the plants are in bloom, one beekeeper told me that you could walk through the clouds of bees in a bathing suit and they wouldn't unsheathe a single stinger.
But if it's a bad year, the opposite is true. If there's drought or flood or fires or if it's unseasonably hot or cold, the bees will get angry and frantic and desperate. If there isn't enough food or honey to go around, they'll wage war on the other hives, eating all the honey for themselves, killing the other workers and queens in hand-to-hand bee combat.
When they're faced with hard times, anything is on the table. We're not so different, us and the bees. There's a saying in the beekeeping business. Take care of your bees and the bees will take care of you. That's beekeeper Steve Godlin, and he knows well that when you're in the honey-making business, essentially you're really in the making bees happy business.
If you're hoping for lots of honey, that's the main metric. And how does one make a bee happy? Well, if you do your best to keep the bears away and place your hives near fresh water and a delicious smorgasbord of seasonally staggered blooming vegetation, you're gonna get more honey than you can give away. You can raise honeybees pretty much anywhere we live.
But there are definitely places that they tend to do the best. Different states average different amounts of honey per hive. And the place the honeybees always seem to thrive the most, the place that is the Disney World, the mecca in American honeybee life, is in Montana. Montana.
Where we live in Montana is like the premium honey producing part of the United States for pounds per colony.
Lloyd Cunniff is a third generation beekeeper in Montana. He learned about bees by tagging along with his grandfather when he'd head out to the hives.
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Chapter 2: What happens to bees during bad years?
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.
Lloyd drove his truck back to Montana, broken. But then, a few months later, something that no one was prepared for. A tip, a break, a miracle, really. This story is hard to believe, but more than one person told us that this is how it went down. In April of that year, 1500 miles away in Missouri, there was a beekeeper talking to his beekeeper friend who works for a bee company in California.
At some point, their conversation turns to the topic of bee theft. And the guy in Missouri is like, yeah, I actually had some of my hives that I sent to California disappear just before almond pollination this year. And as they're having this conversation, Missouri and California guy, the California beekeeper is working on bees in the field. He's surrounded by hives when he's talking on the phone.
And Missouri guy's like, why don't you put me on FaceTime and let me see the boxes you're working on right now. And California guy's like, sure, here. And he starts walking around the hives, showing his friend the boxes, when suddenly, Missouri Guy sees something very familiar. Here's Detective Andreas Solis from the Agricultural Task Force in Fresno.
And he showed him the bee boxes, and the victim was like, yeah, those are my bee boxes. Those have been stolen. That's what broke everything. And then from there, it just had a snowball effect.
So Missouri Guy hops the next plane, comes out, and goes to where his buddy was with local law enforcement.
So they arrived to that location and saw the bee boxes. They were able to confirm that bee boxes did belong to their victim. This was in the middle of the day. It was hot. The bees were agitated.
The bees were swarming, mixing, attacking the other bee clans like a battle from Lord of the Rings.
With bees, it's best to contact them when it's dark. So they kind of just said, OK, well, we'll go ahead. We'll hit it later on that night.
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