Crime Stings | 6

Steve Buscemi here.

This is Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media

in association with Olive Productions.

Today, we ask an age-old question.

How do you steal 50 million bees?

My guess would have been a really, really big net.

It turns out it's a lot more complicated than that.

Sam Mullins has our story today about a lot of missing bees. We've all seen beekeepers tending to hives in their beekeeping suits.
I always assume that as the beekeeper walked among the hives and started pulling screens full of honeycomb, that the suit was the only thing standing between the beekeeper and a thousand angry stingers, that once the hive is opened, all the bees think they're under attack and launch a counter-offensive. But I've learned it's not like that.
Bees only sting when they need to. When they get pinched, when they feel that the hive is under attack, or when they're not getting what they need.
When the honey is flowing and the plants are in bloom, one beekeeper told me that you could walk through the clouds of bees in a bathing suit, and they wouldn't unsheathe a single stinger. But if it's a bad year, the opposite is true.

If there's drought or flood or fires or if it's unseasonably hot or cold,

the bees will get angry and frantic and desperate.

If there isn't enough food or honey to go around, they'll wage war on the other hives,

eating all the honey for themselves,

killing the other workers and queens

in hand-to-hand bee combat.

When they're faced with hard times,

anything is on the table.

We're not so different, us and the bees. There's a saying in the beekeeping business.

Take care of your bees and the bees will take care of you.

That's beekeeper Steve Godlin.

And he knows well that when you're in the honeymaking business, essentially you're really in the making bees happy business. If you're hoping for lots of honey, that's the main metric.
And how does one make a bee happy? Well, if you do your best to keep the bears away and place your hives near fresh water and a delicious smorgasbord of seasonally staggered blooming

vegetation, you're going to get more honey than you can give away. You can raise honeybees pretty much anywhere we live, but there are definitely places that they tend to do the best.
Different states average different amounts of honey per hive, and the place the honeybees always seem to thrive the most? The place that is the Disney World, the mecca in American honeybee life, is in Montana. Where we live in Montana is like the premium honey producing part of the United States for pounds per colony.
Lloyd Cunniff is a third generation beekeeper in Montana. He learned about bees by tagging along with his grandfather when he'd head out to the hives.
And I'm glad that I got to see it. I call it the golden age of honey production because you couldn't do anything wrong.
The weather was perfect. The bees were perfect.
When he was a kid, the honey was always flowing and the bottom lines were right where his granddad liked to see them. But then, beginning just a couple decades ago, even in this bee Eden, Lloyd started to see that something was changing.
And after a couple weird years, he joined the growing chorus of beekeepers who were observing big spikes in their bee mortality rates, like Rowdy Freeman and Steve Godlin.

A lot of beekeepers lost, a lot of hives, more than normal.

The mortality back when I started was 10 to 15 percent.

Now it's in the 50s, 60s, 80 percent losses.

Whole hives vanishing, disappearing.

Nothing but tiny little cupfuls of bees. Yeah, now that's not fun.
There's no shortage of theories of why this is happening. The consensus among the beekeepers we talk to is that it's some cursed confluence of climate change, parasitic mites, GMO crops, and the use of pesticides and fungicides.

But whatever the reason, Lloyd Cunniff's honeybees were disappearing, and the ones that remained seemed more fragile than ever.

Nowadays, the bees don't have that ability to bounce back.

If anything bad happens to them, they're done. The yields that Lloyd had always counted on were getting smaller year over year, and for the first time, he was vulnerable to an especially bad year.
That year was 2016, and he found himself tight for cash. But luckily for Lloyd, he had an option.
An obvious one in the world of beekeeping.

Because it turns out that there's a way to make more money off your bees than with honey.

And as he took stock of his paltry honey harvest that year,

he could hear something on the wind that he could ignore no longer.

California was calling.

California, you're the to create healthier, more productive crops. So farmers pay big money for pollination.
So much so that they've birthed an entire migratory beekeeping industry. If you're good at caring for your bees in different places, and you're comfortable living life on the road, you can make really good money renting out your bees.
It also helps to have a good bee broker, basically a talent agent for your bees, who books the best gigs. And on the migratory bee circuit, the sort of master's tournament on the migratory beekeeping calendar is in the almond pollination in California during February and March.
It's the largest pollination event in the world. There's about 2.3 million honeybee hives needed for almond pollination in the state of California.
There's only a little over 800,000 hives that are considered residents of California. So all those additional hives have to be trucked in from all the various states as far as Florida.
Everybody wants to come to the almonds. You come out with a fat paycheck and your bees come out fat and happy.
It's a beautiful thing. Lloyd had usually resisted the temptation of California because he knew the reason his bees outperformed others in the honey business was because he cared for them with a gentle hand, gave them space, took their lead,

and only put them in terrain that he was familiar with. But for Lloyd, or most people, everyone has their price.
Off of one semi-load, I can make $100,000. In two weeks.
Two weeks, yeah. If he took his outfit to California for two weeks and allowed them to be bees and land on flowers, a farmer would transfer him $100,000 up front.
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to pass that money out. Lloyd got down to work.
His broker secured him a pollination contract with a reputable almond farmer, and he made plans to drive all 488 of his hives to California himself. Now, if your life's work has been spent caring for bees, pretty much the last thing you want to do is strap them to a truck

and fly down a Montana highway in January.

But that's exactly what Lloyd did.

And it's an anxious moment.

There's pressure on beekeepers

to not only deliver bees on time,

but to deliver them in good shape.

Here's Stephen Rowdy.

The growers demand strong hives and you you've got to get them going.

Feeding them, making sure they're healthy,

making sure that they're up to the hive strength required of the contracts.

If for whatever reason the hives didn't make it on the trip,

or something out of his control happened to the bees along the way,

Lloyd's $100,000 could quickly become zero dollars.

So as he hummed down the highway through the snowy landscape with the metal music cranked,

Lloyd could feel the literal weight of his livelihood teetering on the icy flatbed behind him. 48 hours later, when Lloyd pulled over on a gravel road near Yuba City, California, I imagine part of him must have been dreading this moment of truth when he'd walk to

the back of the flatbed and crack open a bee box to see how his soldiers had fared.

But to Lloyd's great delight, every hive he opened hummed with very happy-looking bees.

He worked to spread out all 488 hives in four locations

given to him by his bee broker, 120 hives per location.

And when the sun started to dip, he bid his bees farewell

and called his wife on the way to where he was staying

to give her the good news.

The bees had never looked better. That night, a thick fog rolled in.
The Tule Fog in Central California is known for two things, causing freeway pileups and helping produce some of the most beautiful orchard fruit in the world. It's one of the reasons that 80% of the world's almonds come from where they do, here.
The fog helps the flowers and fruits stay just the right temperature during the winter months. In the place where Lloyd's bees were resting for the night, it's not uncommon for the visibility to go all the way to zero.
The fog was still burning off the next morning when Lloyd headed back out to where his bees were.

And it's here, as he pulled up, that Lloyd experienced the same unfortunate thing most of us will experience at least once.

When you walk out to your car or open your locker or the front door to your place,

and you are confronted by the empty space where your shit is no longer. He stared at the empty lot, where he was quite sure he had just left 120 beehives.

This couldn't be right.

He must have the wrong gravel road.

He didn't know the area very well, and the fog was still clinging to the valley.

But all four areas where he'd spread out his hives mere hours ago, boxes and all, were gone.

What the fuck? In a frenzy, he called his broker, and at first, she thought he was joking, until she remembered that Lloyd isn't the joking type. They alerted the local authorities, and while he waited, he did what we all did when the world wronged us in the year 2017.

He went on Facebook to be like, get a load of this misery.

My livelihood has vanished.

Someone stole my bees.

I was so mad, yeah.

I waited for like two hours for the sheriffs to show up.

And I was on Facebook and I mulled up like two hours for the sheriffs to show up. And I was on Facebook and I mouthed up and oh my god.
It just blew up. As his angry post ricocheted around online, he began to come to grips with the new reality staring him in the face.
Losing bees is a uniquely hopeless position to be in. It's not like they're branded and tagged.
They don't come when you call them. The only thing that connects you to them is the box you put them in.
And boxes aren't exactly the most difficult thing to switch out or counterfeit. So Lloyd started driving around, scanning the fields, looking for someone, anyone who maybe saw something.
I drove around that morning, the hired man and I. Drove around and we stopped and talked to a couple different beekeepers that we saw working in the fields.
Everybody that I talked to said, you'll never find them. In one of the fields nearby, Lloyd saw a young man in a beekeeping suit and he pulled over to talk to him when he received a very discouraging piece of news.
One kid I talked to said that he'd lost 300 colonies the year before and never saw anything of them. Sorry, someone stole 300 hives from this kid too? That's just something that happens in these parts? What is going on around here? It turned out that what happened to Lloyd wasn't an isolated incident.
Not even close. While theft on this scale was unlike anything Lloyd had ever seen, for the beekeepers in California, they'd been hearing more and more horror stories about this kind of thing lately.
Steve Godlin again. You'll hear about a whole semi-load disappearing in the night.
For the past few almond seasons, beekeepers all the way up and down the Central Valley were hearing about thefts big and small. Sometimes it was a handful of hives here, or a couple dozen pulled out of a field.
But some of the the theft sounded the exact same as what happened to Lloyd, right down to the fog. And I go out there and it was a fog and I pull up and I go, why are my bees so short? What's going on? Steve keeps his bees in Visalia, California, and he was hit in the same way.
And like lots of other folks trying to make a buck in pollination, Steve knew exactly how Lloyd felt to lose his bees. I was devastated.
I was completely devastated. And back then I was pretty fiery and ready to murder somebody.
For the beekeepers hit, they knew that it was hopeless. Those bees are gone.
They're gone with the wind. You'll never find them.
But a million six acres. Where are you going to look? Where are you going to start? Because they went into some almond orchard somewhere.
It was obvious that the bees weren't just taken and shipped out of state. No.
If you're stealing bees, the way to turn them into big money is to take them directly into a paying farmer's almond crop. They didn't just pick them up and put them in the hills.
They went into a pollination deal. And good luck figuring out which orchard they went to.
It is literally a needle in a haystack. Hive theft is a very difficult case to investigate.
I'd describe it as a perfect crime. That's Rowdy Freeman again.
Rowdy is uniquely qualified to talk bee theft. He's not only a beekeeper, but also a police detective.
And to understand why he describes stealing bees as the perfect crime, you need to first ponder this question. Who the hell would steal bees? A lot of times the thefts are what we consider an inside job.
It turns out that stealing bees from Lloyd and Steve are only worth something if you know how to get the value out of them. You have to know how to handle bees, you have to know how to move them, you have to have the right equipment.
So it's almost always someone that has been involved in the beekeeping industry. When bees go missing, these guys know to look to their left and look to their right.
Because being a beekeeper and looking like a beekeeper is part of why it's a perfect crime. If you're a civilian driving along a gravel road and you see a bunch of guys in beekeeping suits with beekeeping equipment working on bees,

even the most nervous and annoying among us probably aren't calling the cops, are we?

It's very difficult for someone of the general public to identify a thief versus the legitimate

hive owner. And knowing that it's a beekeeper, someone who understands how hard this work is, it's a deeply unsettling thought to guys like Lloyd and Steve and Rowdy.
Beekeeping is very hard work. You do all that work and then someone comes in and steals them out from underneath of you and makes the money that you were planning on receiving.
It's a big punch to the gut. Here's Steve again.
It's one thing when it's bears eating your bees or a levee breaking and flooding your bees or a fire coming through and burning your bees. That's also devastating and heartbreaking, but it's nowhere as psychologically profound as when It's somebody else doing it to you.
Some other beekeeper. After Lloyd's theft, folks who'd been only moderately worried about this problem were now on edge.
It was undeniable. The problem was getting worse.
So they started asking, what can we do? What can all of us do? One thing I've learned about beekeeping is that it's a really tight-knit community. All these guys know each other.
It's a whole little industry. It's got its own trade magazines and trade associations.
We have conventions and a bunch of truck driver, sheep herder types. It's a business built on loyalty and firm handshakes.
In this business, you need a lot of friends. You got to build your reputation one guy at a time.
It's a very personal relationship kind of business, for reals. But this recent uptick of hive thefts put a stick in the spokes of all that.
When word spread that Lloyd and others were losing their whole outfit in the fog overnight, everyone started getting paranoid, like even Rowdy. Like the conferences and stuff that you attend where the beekeepers from all over the place are there.
You just never know. When I'm talking about hive theft and stuff like that, I know a lot of the people in the room, but there are some people that I don't know.
Because we don't know who is stealing these hives you just you know never know

lloyd and steve and rowdy had no idea who was stealing the hives

but what they did have an idea about was how someone was stealing their hives Well, it was definitely a coordinated effort. It was so foggy the night they got stolen, you couldn't see 100 feet, so nobody would have even seen them.
They go in under darkness in those early morning hours, depending on how many hives they're planning on stealing. In order to steal 700-some colonies in one night, it took more than one truck and a couple guys on each truck.
They weren't semis because there wasn't room to turn a semi around in there. They go in with a 17-foot flatbed.
They can load 96 hives with a forklift. They had forklifts like mine because of the tracks they make in the mud.
They can be in and out in a matter of 15-20 minutes,

and once they have the load on and they're driving down the road,

they look like just a normal beekeeper moving bees.

No one knows that they're actually stolen. It's a very difficult crime to prevent.
If there's no physical evidence or there's no eyewitnesses or there's no photos on cameras of license plates or anything like that, or we don't receive any information from the general public, it's very difficult to investigate. Despite the outpouring of support on his Facebook post and the sympathy he felt from the beekeepers, and despite the reassurances from the authorities that they were taking this crime very seriously, Lloyd didn't hold on to any hope.
He struggled to put one foot in front of the other. He had nothing.
Well, almost nothing. I had one hive of bees left.
I left one hive at home in Montana. The rest of my scent down there and they stole them all.
So I had to start over from scratch. 57 years old and I had to start over from scratch.
I'm thinking about retiring. Now I gotta, there's no way I can retire.
Lloyd drove his truck back to Montana, broken.

But then, a few months later, something that no one was prepared for.

A tip, a break, a miracle, really.

This story is hard to believe, but more than one person told us that this is how it went down. In April of that year, 1,500 miles away in Missouri, there was a beekeeper talking to his beekeeper friend who works for a bee company in California.
At some point, their conversation turns to the topic of bee theft. And the guy in Missouri is like, yeah, I actually had some of my hives that I sent to California disappear just before almond pollination this year.
And as they're having this conversation, Missouri and California guy, the California beekeeper is working on bees in the field. He's surrounded by hives when he's talking on the phone.

And Missouri guy's like, why don't you put me on FaceTime and let me see the boxes you're working on right now.

And California guy's like, sure, here.

And he starts walking around the hives, showing his friend the boxes,

when suddenly Missouri guy sees something very familiar. Here's Detective Andreas Solis from the Agricultural Task Force in Fresno.
And he showed him the bee boxes, and the victim was like, yeah, those are my bee boxes. Those have been stolen.
That's what broke everything. Then from there, it just had a snowball effect.
So Missouri guy hops the next plane, comes out, and goes to where his buddy was with local law enforcement. So they arrived to that location and saw the bee boxes.
They were able to confirm that bee boxes did belong to their victim. This was in the middle of the day.
It was hot. The bees were agitated.
The bees were swarming, mixing, attacking the other bee clans like a battle from Lord of the Rings.

With bees it's best to contact them when it's dark. So they kind of just said, okay, well, we'll go ahead and we'll hit it later on that night.

That night they headed back to the site, a place Detective Solis was familiar with. I go by there every day when I go home.
So it's an area that's well-traveled and they're right in the corner of it. When they went in that night, they were relieved to find that the bees were a lot more drowsy.
So they were able to have a look around. So normally when you see bee boxes, everything's pretty uniform.
The boxes all match. They're stacked, make two boxes high.
These were stacked really high. The boxes would seem like they were mix-matched.
Different colors and sizes of boxes piled high. Many toppled over.
Several with the names and phone numbers of the owners scrawled or stenciled on. But when the search party happened upon a series of workbenches littered with routers, paint, and work lights, it was very easy to see what these crooks had been up to.
The suspects were already painting over these boxes with their own whitewashed paint.

They were taking out all the brands and stuff.

I described it as a chop shop for bee boxes rather than vehicles.

So they're painting the boxes.

They're putting their own phone numbers on there.

There's different names on there.

So it's really hard to find the victim.

On one of them, I got lucky because through the paint, you could see a phone number.

So as authorities started making contact with the victims whose numbers they could decipher, word spread rapidly through the beekeeping community, with the news reaching even Lloyd, the saddest beekeeper in Montana, who hopped a plane to Fresno. But as he arrived on site the next day, he couldn't believe what he saw.
I mean, it was just an unbelievable nightmare. In addition to switching boxes, repainting and re-stenciling on bogus branding and phone numbers, the thieves had been splitting hives in an attempt to double their money on the almond contracts.
It was just a total nightmare. You know, hives tipped over and mixed together.
Oh God, it was just like a nightmare. When the bees are taken their colonies are mixed, the way they had them all mixed up and all that, they're going to be agitated.
They're not going to be very happy campers. And they weren't.
I was stung like nine times during this whole thing. In the following couple of days, dozens of beekeepers were arriving from out of state.
And after all the anger and paranoia and side-eye of the past few months, news of this discovery was a very welcome rallying moment in the industry. All of a sudden, the strength of the community was on full display as everyone sifted through the damage and tried to identify the rightful owners of the hives together.
They would see something and say, hey, that belongs to so-and-so, you know, that's the way they do their bee boxes. As beekeepers kept arriving, hoping to find their bees, Solis saw their emotions run the gamut.
One beekeeper was almost in tears she was so happy. I remember she was talking to her bees, like, oh babies, you're.
And then on the other side of the spectrum, they were just disgusted that their hives had been so badly treated and were now, you know, in one case the guy said, I won't even probably be able to use these bees, they're too aggressive. You know, honeybees aren't normally like that, but when you mix them up and you mix the colonies, they become agitated like that.

As Lloyd worked through the night to identify all of his boxes and try and do some damage control on the hives,

he noticed that the police would hang around the perimeter at all hours.

And so the cops were there all the time.

We were there trying to get our stuff out of there.

We thought they were watching us, but they were there guarding us. I found out later.
Just because Lloyd had miraculously been reunited with his colonies didn't mean he was out of the woods yet. No one knew what these thieves were capable of or what sort of scene would ensue if they were to arrive at the site.
They still didn't know how many of them were out there or if they were armed. The only thing they knew for sure was that they were still nearby.
Because that first night, Lloyd had packed a truck with all of his recovered stuff, but he had to leave some of his hives behind until the next day. The next night, we had to go back to get the rest of it.
And those guys had come in and stolen some of the stuff back again. Some of the stuff that I'd gone through and marked was gone.
Then the sheriffs, they found part of them again. They were stolen twice and recovered twice.
By the time Lloyd was able to get his second load onto the truck, he couldn't get out of the state of California fast enough. He knew he had a lot of work ahead of him, building new hives, quarantining the recovered bees.
But after a winter spent stewing in despair, he was up for the challenge ahead. They're all back home.
I was working on them today when you called me today. We got them back in pretty good shape.
This was a rare happy ending for the victims of bee theft, almost an unheard of one. Everyone involved was jubilant that spring, but the thing that made them even happier than folks getting their bees back was news that local law enforcement had charged two suspects with the crimes, Pavel Tovertnov and Vitaly Yurashenko.
Pavel was the first name in the authority's crosshairs

after Detective Solis was led to him sorting through some boxes at the original site. I got lucky because through the paint you could see a phone number and I called that phone number and it happened to be a guy who just happened to be in Fresno.
A total of 75 boxes that were stolen we were able to cover four of them at that spot and they just happen to be in Fresno. A total of 75 boxes that were stolen.
We were able to recover four of them at that spot. And they just happened to be in the possession of the guy who had given us the initial call and said, hey, I think these boxes are stolen.
And they happened to be the ones that he had bought from Pavel. Once they had Pavel's name, they were able to piece together the locations of a few vehicles and properties that were in his name, which led them to suspect number two.

As we start getting more and more information, we identify other sites.

And then we identify this other person, this Vitaly person.

Vitaly Yurushenko.

We got some inside information from someone that said that Vitaly is going to be involved

and this is where he has a spot out on Highway 180.

And sure enough, we went out there and we found more bees. On the property, there was a small trailer among the discarded bee boxes where they'd heard Vitaly had been living.
And a short time after that, he was found and told he was under arrest with the right to an attorney. My paralegal told me that I had a new client who had been accused of stealing bees.
And I thought to myself, who steals bees? Ryan Friedman is a criminal defense attorney in Sacramento and was representing Vitaly. After getting up to speed on the case, it was clear to the lawyer that neither of these guys were caught with a smoking gun.
There was no strong evidence that definitively proved that they had taken these hives. But as for circumstantial evidence, as Solis explains, there were a lot of reasons he suspected these two.
There was one time that Pavel reported his own truck as being stolen. The rumor was that his vehicle was stuck in some mud and it had stolen bee boxes on it.
And all of a sudden he calls it in and has stolen the vehicle. Another time, both suspects were stopped in a rural area near northfield just for a routine field interview a sort of what are you guys doing up here and they were like we just uh we're at the casino and we had to pee so we're looking for a place to do that well not long not long after, or right around that same time,

is when there was a big theft of bees up there in that area.

And then there was the time Vitaly had a falling out with another beekeeper,

just before that beekeeper left town for a family vacation in Jamaica.

They came back and their bees were gone,

and the only one that really knew where the bees were at other than the farmer was Vitaly.

It just went on and on. But again, all circumstantial.
Who knows what a jury would have said? You know, at the end of the day, you never know what a jury would say. But the case kept getting delayed again and again.
And public interest, which was once ferocious, started to wane. And surprisingly, even among beekeepers, the initial excitement and calls for blood died down too.
And they died down because there was one data point that everyone in the California bee community was talking about. Hive thefts were way down.
And while everyone was initially convinced that these guys were two cogs in a much larger machine, there were so few thefts after their arrest that people started thinking, shit, maybe it really was just these two guys. And then, just as prosecution looked like they were finally nearing a trial date, everything ground to a halt.
Here's Ryan, Vitaly's lawyer again. What ended up happening is Mr.
Tvertonov had passed away. And with Pavel, the assumed leader of the operation, dead and no smoking gun in sight, Vitaly pleaded no contest to three counts of receiving stolen property,

which meant his originally proposed 29 years and deportation sentence decreased significantly.

What it settled for was ultimately 45 days on house arrest,

a restitution of $13,000.

And after that, things carried on like normal.

Steve still loves being a beekeeper and talking about beekeeping.

I should get a beer.

If I popped a beer, we'll never get out of here. Lloyd got his hive strength back up and even started sending them to California again.

I'll see you next time. and talking about beekeeping.
I should get a beer. If I popped a beer, we'll never get out of here.

Lloyd got his hive strength back up and even started sending them to California again.

And I figured, well, what's the chances?

My number came up once that somebody else has turned me on.

And as for Rowdy, the beekeeping detective,

he continues his work with his eyes on the data.

I ended up being the person that would track the deaths from year to year. And in the two years after Pavel's death, the numbers continued to drop.
The beekeeping community as a whole was very excited about it. The following year in 2018, you know, there were less than 100 hives reported stolen throughout the state.
So that's pretty telling if it goes from 1,000 to 1,700

to less than 100, that they had the right people.

And the numbers remained there into early 2020. All of a sudden, this year is starting to pick up again.
In 2022, the most recent year for which we have data, reported hive thefts were at an all-time high.

I just think it's a revolving door.

You take one person out and another one steps in.

It's just kind of how law enforcement and crime works.

Next week on Big Time, she's beauty, she's grace, she's stupendous, Shirley S. This has been Big Time,

an Apple Original Podcast

produced by

Peace of Work Entertainment

and Campside Media

in association

with Olive Productions.

It's hosted by me,

Steve Buscemi.

This episode was written

by Sam Mullins

and produced by

Lindsay Kilbride.

Original reporting

was done by Josh Dean,

our story editor is Audrey Quinn. Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer.
Our production team includes Amy Padula, Rajiv Gola, Morgan Jaffe, and associate producer Dania Abdelhameed. Fact-checking by Mary Mathis.

Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviron.

Our theme was written

by Nicholas Principe

and Peter Silberman

of Spatial Relations.

Production help

from Ashley Ann Krigbaum

and Shristi Prava.

Campside Media's

executive producers

are Josh Dean,

Vanessa Gregoriadis,

Adam Hoff,

and Matt Scher.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening.