Security issues & theft of property.

[thesoapdragon]

Part of our business is beekeeping and using our honey and wax in our products. We are planning to expand this and my husband has invested money, a LOT of time and a lot of emotional effort into slowly building up numbers of hives. Next year we were hoping to have about 10 hives and then build up to 20 over the next couple of years.
Ok that's the background - now hubby has just told me that one of the beekeepers he knows has had a serious attempt to rob all of their hives, to the extent of cutting through wire fences, a trolley found at the scene to take away whole beehives etc etc. They were obviously disturbed in the middle of their crime. I have heard that this sort of theft is on the rise because of the rarity and value of honey bees. Very worrying as the colonies are split up and sold on ebay. £250 for a small colony. The place their bees were on is very isolated with no nearby roads. 

What we can't understand is how the thieves are finding relatively small items in isolated areas. So, my question is, can these things be found on google earth or similar programmes? We think the hives in our garden may be reasonably safe but if we expand we will have to keep the extra bees on farmland. If anyone has any ideas on this I would be really grateful.

[JhnStcks]

No ideas on how they find the hives, but if I were you I would be looking into fitting the hives with some sort of tracking devices much like this site offers http://tlrsystems.com/property-recovery.html although that is a US site, there must be someone doing the same in UK.  You would also need to look into the legal side of using tracking devices.

[thesoapdragon]

No ideas on how they find the hives, but if I were you I would be looking into fitting the hives with some sort of tracking devices much like this site offers http://tlrsystems.com/property-recovery.html although that is a US site, there must be someone doing the same in UK.  You would also need to look into the legal side of using tracking devices.

Thanks, that is good thinking. I did see a recent Click programme and some of those devices look pretty good. I think all the pieces to the hives would have to be security tagged too - could end up costing a fortune :(

[rossi67]

tracking is certainly an option
or
make the hives one next to another and have cctv surveillance
that will allow you to see who is doing what