An experienced beekeeper is suspected of stealing 40,000 bees from Anglesey in one of Britain’s biggest bee rustling cases in years.

Only someone with a bee suit and veil could have pulled off the heist on Paul Williams’s hive in Rhydwyn “without getting stung to smithereens”, police said.

The miserably rainy summer could have ruined the thief’s own honey production and driven them to carry out the theft, one expert has suggested.

Poor weather, combined with the increased popularity of beekeeping, has also pushed up the price of a “nucleus” – a set of wooden frames plus a family of bees and a queen – from £50 to at least £200, according to Diane Roberts of the British Beekeepers Association.

Bees do not like rain, she said. “When it is rainy the bees don’t fly every day, or they can only go out for a couple of hours when there is a break between showers.

“All the wet weather will help the flowers produce a lot of nectar, but the bees can’t get out. If the bees live somewhere without a lovely big patch of flowers nearby they may fly up to 13km [8 miles] to collect the pollen and nectar, but if it’s rainy they won’t make it that far in the gaps between showers.”

Instead the bees stay in their hive and eat their own honey while they wait for the sun to come out.

Williams keeps bees as a hobby in a ditch in a field in Rhydwyn on Anglesey. He checks on his swarm weekly but found the £400 hive and the 30,000-40,000 bees inside had been taken sometime between 26 July and 2 August.

PC Dewi Evans of the North Wales police said: “It is an unusual crime – there aren’t that many people who know how to steal bees.

“We believe whoever was responsible must have been wearing a full bee suit, otherwise they would have been stung to smithereens and very badly injured.”

Evans appealed for information from anyone who may have noticed an unusual buzzing sound in their neighbourhood.

Roberts agreed that the thief must be an experienced apiarist. “You need to know what you are doing to steal a hive – which entrances of the hive to block up, and not to use solid tape, otherwise you could suffocate the bees,” she said.

She also suggested the thief must have had a getaway car, or at least a trolley. A honey “super”, the box that holds the frames where the bees store their honey, weights at least 40lb (18kg) when full, she said. A hive can have up to eight supers.



Roberts suggested that the increased price of a nucleus was turning some beekeepers rogue. “You used to be able to get a ‘nuke’ for £50. Now it’s never less than £200.”

The price rise is partly down to her organisation’s successful drive to increase beekeeping, she said. The organisation now has 25,000 members, up from just 8,000 in 2010. “As a consequence, the price of a nucleus has increased a lot,” she said.

It is not the first bee heist on Anglesey. In the summer of 2015, 45,000 bees were stolen from the same farm near Cemaes Bay in two separate raids.



Another beekeeper was also suspected of stealing 24,000 bees worth about £2,000 from the Hooton Pagnell Hall estate, near Doncaster, in April. A bee smoker was left at the scene, possibly used to calm the bees before they were taken.

Bee rustling is a particular problem in the US, where crime syndicates have been involved in stealing bee colonies worth millions of dollars and trucking them to almond farms and olive groves. Billions of bees are needed to pollinate California’s almond and orange crops – more than live in the Golden State.

Earlier this year, about $1m (£770,000) worth of stolen bees were found in a field in Fresno County in what the local sheriff’s department described as a “beehive chop shop”.

