FAIRBANKS — Conventional wisdom might advise that a person would have to be either foolish or brave to break into a beehive, but that is just what someone did recently at the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Georgeson Botanical Garden.
An unknown person or persons climbed a fence and stole al
l of the honey and honeycomb inside one of the garden’s three hives on Tuesday night or Wednesday. It was the second such raid this summer.
“Last week was the first time, and they took a piece of comb. Then this morning we found out that someone had gone in and completely cleaned it out,” said Pat Holloway, director of the botanical gardens. “The bees were just starting to put honey in it.”
The first theft prompted staff to build a fence, but that did nothing to deter the thief.
“They crawled through the fence and emptied out the hive anyway,” Holloway said. “It’s pretty expensive to buy the hives, so you get pretty angry.”
Chief Sean McGee of the University Police Department suggested security cameras be installed at the gardens because of the recent vandalism.
According to Holloway, a request for extra funds to purchase the surveillance equipment was denied by university officials.
The thieves concentrated their efforts on a top bar hive and ignored two others. The top bar hive is easier to enter because it has racks that slide vertically inside a box, instead of the horizontal frames of conventional bee hives. The combs were sliced off and the queen bee and most of the worker bees are missing, Holloway said.
Experts said it doesn’t necessarily take an experienced beekeeper to pull off a theft of this nature, but some knowledge would be helpful.
“My guess is that they probably knew a little bit about bees. A couple of bee stings will deter 99 percent of people who go to rob honey,” Stephen Petersen, a local beekeeper, said.
“The interesting thing to me is that it’s unlikely that the random John Doe would know to come back in a week (after the first theft) and that they (the bees) would have rebuilt the comb that was destroyed,” said Petersen’s daughter, Amrit Khalsa-Petersen, also an experienced beekeeper.
Even so, it’s possible the honey thief is simply a vandal with little fear of bees.
“Some kids are like bears. They see it and they taste it and it’s good and then they come back for more,” Khalsa-Petersen said.
While the botanical garden will continue to keep its two remaining hives, the bees in the top bar hive will not be replaced.
“We don’t have any money to replace it, and it’s too late in the season now anyway,” Holloway said.
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