Honey poachers smash up bee ‘farm’

The recent full moon was a bad omen for local bee-keepers Trevor Thompson, Rob Hewitt and Ringo Nonyathela.

The full moon brings out strange creatures sometimes… including honey poachers.

The three men keep a bee box ‘farm’ in a forest belonging to a farmer in the Glendale Heights area. While they have come to expect a certain amount of loss to poachers, nothing prepared them for the destruction that they saw at the weekend.

“We lost 25 bee boxes filled with big swarms and lovely Eucalyptus honey!” said Thompson.

“We received a call at 6am from the farmer to tell us that there were bee boxes and bee frames scattered over his aircraft landing strip, torn apart by the thieves to get to the honey.

“We arrived there to see absolute chaos and were immediately attacked by bees still on the rampage and keen to sting everything in sight.”

Some of the boxes had been set alight and the rest had been smashed beyond repair.

“We spent the entire day collecting the debris and only managed to rescue five or six of the swarms by patching together the broken boxes and coaxing the bees into them. Unfortunately we live in a country where nothing is sacred,” said a distraught Thompson.

He said the value of the loss was about R40 000. According to the bee association, about 75 percent of bee-keepers give up because of vandalism. The cost of a new bee box is around R1 100 and it takes up to a year for the swarms to get really strong.

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