A professional bee-keeper has had 37 hives stolen from open land between Glencoe and Ben Lomond. He said another eight of his hives were poisoned.
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Jim Stewart had moved 50 hives from Stokers Siding near Byron Bay to the area in the Northern Tablelands to seek better pollen.
They had been there for about eight weeks but when he returned last month, he found the 37 in one area had been taken and eight of the 13 in another area about a hundred metres away were poisoned in what he called a “senseless act”.
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He says he has no dispute with anyone who might want to maliciously damage his product.
He thinks the theft was for monetary gain because the hives were full of honey. He said that he had learnt since his own theft of two other substantial raids in the area, one of 60 hives near Glen Innes and another of a hundred hives near Guyra.
The thieves must have been from within the industry, he says, because they knew how to move the hives without being stung. They would have needed a flat-bed truck or a trailer.
When he was passing through Tenterfield with the 13 surviving hives, he said he pulled into a service station and a police car from Tenterfield happened to pull in, too, so he reported the loss.
“I had them out there for almost two months”, he said, “for the high quality pollen. That’s why I took them there – to breed up and become really strong.
“They were there for about two months and they were really full of honey.”
He reckons they were worth about $9,000.
He doesn’t know if there’s any connection between the poisoning of the remaining hives and the theft of the others. “I’m not sure why they were poisoned. It was a really mean thing to do”.
