‘I felt violated’: Beekeeper offers $100,000 reward in brazen Fresno beehive thefts
Pollination of the vast acreage dedicated to almonds alone requires many millions of bees.
By Melissa Gomez
LA Times
Feb. 15, 2024
Excerpt:
Andy Strehlow felt a deep and familiar sting when he saw the beehives were missing.
Just days before, the bees had been trucked more than 1,700 miles from his bee farm in South Dakota to a sprawling almond orchard near Firebaugh in Fresno County. He’d unpacked the boxes — 416 hives housing millions of buzzing bees — and placed them strategically around the property so his bees could work their magic, pollinating the almond blossoms in time for a late-summer harvest.
Three days later, on Jan. 31, he sensed a gap — a dismaying silence where bees should have been active — and it didn’t take him long to realize 96 hives were missing, brazenly kidnapped sometime in the night.
“I felt violated,” said Strehlow, a commercial beekeeper who has grown Strehlow Bees Inc. into one of the largest beekeeping operations in the U.S. “Quite likely it’s another beekeeper, and that’s what really stings about it: beekeepers stealing from other beekeepers.”
And it wasn’t the first time his hives had gone missing. In the 25 years he’s been raising bees, Strehlow estimates he’s had close to 1,000 hives stolen. It was time, he thought, to take a stand.
So Strehlow is advertising a $100,000 reward for information on the bee thief — about three times more than the 96 hives are worth. He’s hoping that sizable sum is enough to get someone close to the culprit — a wife, sister, brother — to turn him in.
