Page 5 - Bloomberg Businessweek July 2018

Bloomberg Businessweek
THE HEIST ISSUE

ask questions,” Philip Strachan says, “because without screened sides along with six bodyguard bees that tend
those bees, he’s not going to have a crop.” to her needs in transit.
At the top of the pyramid for the Strachans is pol-
C unniff’s main business is honey. That’s how it used lination. The company maintains an average of 10,000
to be for most apiaries, especially those on the
hives in a given year, an exponential leap from the 600
high plains of the western U.S., where the air is clear, Valeri’s father started with and the most it has the space
the water is clean, and the forage, as keepers call the for. Bees move from almonds to prunes to any one of
many plants bees plunder for pollen and nectar, is plen- many other crops: apples, cherries, melons, sunflowers.
tiful. Bees in Montana and the Dakotas produce more This summer there are eight Strachan hives in a cilantro
honey per hive than any other bees in America, and field; others will soon be sent to farmers of alfalfa seed.
that’s been good enough to keep three generations of Back in 2013, a Whole Foods in Rhode Island wanted
Cunniffs housed and fed, with money left over to vaca- people to recognize how important bees are to their daily
tion in Hawaii and send the kids to good colleges. diet. For a few days, the market removed all produce that
But the business isn’t what it used to be, for them or grew on plants that depend on pollinators. More than
anyone else who raises bees commercially. Today’s com- half of the section was empty: 237 of 453 products in the
mercial beekeeper can never relax. He can expect to lose section, or 52 percent of the store’s produce, were gone.
30 percent of his bee stock every year, from bad flower
love honey, just like the cartoons say. Climate change is I n late May 2017, four months after Cunniff’s hives van-
years, pesticides, disease, and bears, which really do
ished in the fog, someone who knew enough about
a problem, especially as it pertains to drought, because bees to recognize an odd sight called the Fresno County
bees need lots of water. They both drink it and collect it Sheriff’s Office to report something suspicious: A vacant
to take back to the hives for the queen and her nurses, lot at the inter section of two roads about 20 minutes east
which is why you always find bees floating in pools and of downtown Fresno was filled with bee boxes—many
buzzing around leaky sinks. more than any reputable beekeeper would store at a sin-
“We spend so much money to keep them alive,” gle location. And it wasn’t just too many boxes. These were 73
Cunniff says. “We feed them pollen substitutes that scattered all over the one-acre lot, stacked haphazardly,
we never, ever dreamed of.” Those are $2.50 a pop for and in various shapes, sizes, and colors.
each hive. “They used to make enough honey to make When a Fresno County Sheriff’s deputy arrived at mid-
it through the winter. Now they won’t make it. You got day to inspect the site, bees impeded his investigation.
to feed them corn syrup at 40¢ a gallon.” Twice a year, They’re most active in warm temperatures, and these bees
he treats for varroa mites, a scourge his father never were agitated—too agitated for him to get anywhere near
had to deal with. The treatment used to cost $1 a hive. the boxes without getting stung.
It’s now $4. Cops returned later, this time after dark, and found
“It’s probably twice the labor it used to be to main- what Fresno Detective Andres Solis called a “chop shop”
tain the beehives,” says Valeri Strachan, who took over for hives. A man in full beekeeper regalia—veil and all—
the Strachan Apiaries business when her father passed was sitting in a passage between some stacked boxes that
away and will soon hand it over to Philip. Honey is third seemed to be his workspace. He appeared to be in the pro-
on the list of revenue streams for the Strachans. Above cess of splitting each colony into two, so he’d have twice as
that is queen bee breeding. If an apiary in America is many hives to market. (Half the hives would then be with-
using Carniolan queens, they’ve almost certainly been out a queen, of course, but healthy hives often split any-
bred by the Strachans, who’ve perfected the art. Valeri’s way, when they get overpopulated. The bees make a new
specialty, and it’s a rare one, is instrumental insemi- queen from a fertilized egg.) Nearby was a station where
nation. She’s one of a handful of Americans who can someone had been sanding and repainting, as well as a
extract semen from drone bees and use it to insemi- stencil for the name that had been sloppily spray-painted
nate virgin queens, a delicate skill requiring a steady on many of the boxes: Allstate Apiaries Inc.
hand, tiny tools, and a microscope. The Strachans pro- That was the name of the apiary operated by the
duce close to 50,000 queen bees a year. “We use some, man detectives arrested there, a 51-year-old Ukrainian
some die, and then the rest are shipped,” Philip says. immigrant named Pavel Tveretinov, who’d been renting
A healthy Carniolan queen costs $31 (or $28 if you buy hives to local almond growers and selling them to buy-
bulk); she’ll be sent overnight by UPS in a tiny box with ers around the U.S.

“I WOULDN’T STEAL MY NEIGHBOR’S CAR AND PARK IT RIGHT NEXT DOOR”