[rant]Cage free eggs[rant]

There are a lot of “nomads” in the contract pollination buisness. They travel around the country as a full time gig chasing pollen flows. Those stolen hives may very well be 1,000 miles away before they are even noticed being gone. Add in spring time there is a big market for “package bees”. Two pounds of bees and a queen will bring close to $200, and if they can harvest some honey or use the equipment (another $500).. thieves will be thieves. Trackers hidden in the combs have started to be used to combat it.
There’s very interesting documentary called “The Pollinators” that really gets into the whole national pollination business. Beekeepers move their hives around the country, traveling based on different crop schedules.

It’s worth checking out, even though it does seem to go on a little long.

I think it’s available on YouTube and Prime.

 
My wife put an AirTag in my car recently claiming it was so she'd know if I had already left Costco, grocery store etc. if she had forgotten to put something on the list. Not living in the Apple ecosystem, I didn't know it was there until my daughter asked me about it when she borrowed my car. My wife never said anything. I told her I don't think she'd be so forgiving if I were hiding tracking devices on her :lol:
Yeah...that's sketchy. Location sharing on Google Maps is the easy way to accomplish that. Hidden tracker in the car? My wife and I would be having words. My Pixel popped up with a tracker alert when the AirTag I put on my motorcycle was detected. I thought that was reassuring.
 
There’s very interesting documentary called “The Pollinators” that really gets into the whole national pollination business. Beekeepers move their hives around the country, traveling based on different crop schedules.

It’s worth checking out, even though it does seem to go on a little long.

I think it’s available on YouTube and Prime.


Was hunting out in MT and WY a few years ago and driving along some sketchy backroads to get to a small piece of public land, we found a field that was apparently used for overwinter storage of the travelling hive boxes. It had to be thousands of hive boxes (all empty) stacked up neatly in the field.
 
Speaking of hives, thought of you last night when the news talked about the prevalence of hive theft. Even more interesting (to me), it's not like you can take a hive to the local pawn shop and turn it into cash. This means beekeepers are stealing from other beekeepers.
I can't find the picture. But I was leaving a job in Chicago and someone had a couple hives in a little garden. Chains wrapped around the hives and locked.
 
I can only imagine the difficulty in weighing bees precisely enough to be able to confidently sell them. It's tough enough getting my cat to sit on a scale.
Package bees are bees shaken from multiple hives. Shake them into a funnel directly into a "cage". I haven't had to buy packages in a while, but I always bought 3# packages. Roughly 10,000.
 
Package bees are bees shaken from multiple hives. Shake them into a funnel directly into a "cage". I haven't had to buy packages in a while, but I always bought 3# packages. Roughly 10,000.
No, I had something more like this in mind.

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No, I had something more like this in mind.

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Lol, that’s not how they are sold, that’s what happens when the owners of the company that’s ran well for a decade and a half hire a bunch of “experts” in their field, buisness administration ,logististics, inventory, hr, and so on come in with zero experience in the field and demand that the impossible be done through shear ignorance of how any of it works.
 
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Lol, that’s not how they are sold, that’s what happens when the owners of the company that’s ran well for a decade and a half hire a bunch of “experts” in their field, buisness administration ,logististics, inventory, hr, and so on come in with zero experience in the field and demand that the impossible be done through shear ignorance of how any of it works.

Edit: same as in the egg industry…
Feels like a lot of industries are that way.
 
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