It would only take a very few GPS locaters between multiple bee keepers to lead law enforcement to the “chop shop”. The bee keeper association could choose bee keepers randomly. If the same insurance company insures multiple bee keepers, it might benefit them to GPS a few of their customers.
Yes. Theft here in NZ has thieves specifically seeking out tracking systems (passive, like marked frames) scattering unwanted parts around paddocks and taking good frames only. Keep in mind that the honey frames have to be extracted, and these usually go to an extraction facility so they can notify people if suspicious. This happens frequently in NZ but our market would be far smaller. This part of the process is now requiring tracking here for quality control (quite how is a mystery to beekeepers) and do it wouldn’t be too hard to add a marker of ownership. Barcodes and QR codes are used on boxes and there is plenty of discussion about adding it to frames.
It’s too late once the hives have been gone long like in the article. No one in their right mind would want them back as the disease risk is far too great. American foul brood is cured by burning the gear.
Like door locks, slowing thieves down would would have some value in itself.
The beekeeper in the article had 488 hives stolen in one night. That’s 488 hives the thieves would need to check. The GPS locators don’t “wake up” until theey detect motion so it’s not as simple as scanning them for a cell signal.
The most effective method is probably to spend a couple hundred a night to hire a security guard to sit with the hives while they're all so concentrated.
I could see buying a bunch of cheap RFID tags and putting them in the frames. Drill a little hole, put it in, fill the rest with glue or epoxy so it is difficult to remove without obvious marks. They could just be a simple number progression that can be recorded in a log, nothing too fancy.
Those are used in NZ in a growing way (judging by beekeeper discussions only, no actual data). There is a new regulatory requirement to track boxes over the season and provide data on honey origin. There are a variety of low tech solutions, but some clever technical ones. Eg this one, that allows consumers to trace their own pot of honey. http://www.hivetech.nz/beekeepers-find
The amount of theft probably hasn't risen to that level yet. It's not so much the trackers, but who is going to track the trackers. They'd have to be on the case fast or risk the thieves removing the trackers.
