Rotten (2018–2019): Season 1, Episode 1 - Lawyers, Guns & Honey - full transcript

[suspenseful synth music]

[man]
There's some romance about bees.

Romances are not so easily explained.

You just have to feel that.

Honey has the greatest cachet
in the marketplace, of all food items.

Nothing else has that high of a rating.

[narrator] Honey is everywhere.

A sweetener so natural, so exalted,
that its value has held up for millennia.

[man] More of us are wanting
to buy food that we know the source of.

The honey industry is perfect
for a food-enlightened culture.

[narrator] But honey is also perfect
for savvy profiteers



who are secretly cutting the world's honey
with cheap substitutes.

The supply cannot meet the demand.

Consumers are eating a product
that is not honey.

[narrator] All along the supply chain,

the 9,000-year tradition of beekeeping
is under full-scale assault.

Industrial farming is wiping out
the bees' habitat.

Bees are dying by the tens of billions.

[man] They don't bounce back.

Just one thing sets them on their head
and they're done. They just never recover.

[narrator] And the lure of quick cash
has spawned a new kind of honey crime.

[man] That guy
then pays double for a product

that is not what it says on the label.

It is a fraud, and that's a crime.

[tense orchestral music]



[man] I learn something new
about bees almost every year.

There's just an unstoppable depth
to the bees.

There's so much detail in what they do.

So the first time I got stung,
my face swelled up.

That was it for me, at eight years old.

But I got stung again
and it wasn't as bad.

By the time I was 15 or 16,
I was working bees on a regular.

You got hive tools over there, JP?

Yeah, got it.

The bees are feeding off of these trees
behind us, the Yaupon holly,

so they get nectar from those blooms.

These bees are like,
"You all are out of your mind."

[narrator] In the spring and summer,
the honey bee gorges herself

on the nectar of a thousand flowers.

But blossoms fade and wither away,

and bees want to keep eating the nectar
all year long,

so they preserve it, and store it.

The result is so delicious

that humans have been savoring it
for thousands of years.

The bees drink up
the nectar in the flower.

They'll suck it up.
Their tongue is almost like a straw.

And they have a special stomach.
We call it a honey gut.

And they use that
to add enzymes to the nectar.

[narrator] The bee returns
to the hive carrying a load

that weighs almost as much as she does,

and spits up the nectar
into another bee's mouth.

They go through that three times.

One bee will add a little bit, pass it on
to the next bee. She'll add a bit.

And the last step is for them
to store it in a cell.

They fan it a little bit to air it.

[narrator] Their wings flapping
more than 12,000 times a minute,

the bees dehydrate the nectar
and thicken it into a golden syrup.

That's honey they haven't sealed yet,
because they're still filling it.

They're either adding honey to it
or closing it up.

And these are full frames
of honey, sealed up.

They will open that
whenever they need to,

and that may not be until, you know,
December when they get hungry again.

We're gonna take that burden off them.

Really what we're doing is robbing them.

[narrator] A worker bee lives 40 days,
and makes less than a teaspoon of honey.

But in high season,
the 50,000 bees in a single colony

can make 30 pounds a week.

[Jon] That's at least 60 pounds.

We're going to give it
a couple bounces.

[bees buzzing]

That's where the bees got most
of the nectar from, that yaupon nectar.

We get stung less with the smoke.

This is what I'm talking about.
Getting that honey right out of the hive.

Even as a kid that was the best part
about coming out to the bee yard.

-[Jon] See that piece?
-[JP] Yeah.

-[Jon] Tear that.
-[JP] Look at that.

-Yeah!
-[Jon] That's good stuff.

[JP] We're just going to throw that
on top of the box and bring it back.

[Jon] Just like little pets,
when they're feeding like that.

A lot of the honey we're pulling off
is just in the top of the hive.

There's honey that we're not taking,
that will stay with them.

[narrator] For beekeepers, the care
of the colony is a sacred cause.

Even so, for more than a decade,

bees around the world
have been dying in record numbers.

[man] You never know.

Even though you got your bees
all up and going, you never know.

You can go back in two weeks and your bees
would all be gone. They just disappear.

That's colony collapse.

They have never figured it out.

It's not like they've been sprayed.

They're not laying dead
in front of the hive.

[narrator] When the crisis erupted
around 2006,

it was labeled "colony collapse disorder."

Today, scientists believe the bees
are dying from a combination of stresses,

brought on by parasites, by insecticides,

and by agri-business monocultures
that replace flowering meadows

with acres of crops
which offer bees no nectar at all.

Beekeepers have found ways
to rebuild their bee colonies.

But the amount of honey the bees make
keeps dropping.

[man] We work very hard

to ameliorate
all of these stress factors on bees,

and yet our colony loss numbers
in the United States

are right now at about 50% per year.

It would be shocking if all
the cattle ranchers of America said,

"We lost half our cattle this winter."

But somehow when the beekeeper says,
"We lost half our bees,"

it's not quite as shocking.

[mysterious harp music]

[narrator] It's not just the bees.

Beekeepers are fighting to stay alive.

Struggling in a global business
that is soured

by deception, corruption, and larceny.

[harp music builds in intensity]

[mechanical rattling]

[narrator] The crazy thing is,
the honey business is actually booming.

Everyone is eating more honey.

For almost a decade, worldwide
honey consumption has been rising

by more than 40 million pounds a year.

The US alone is responsible
for more than half of that.

The math doesn't make sense.

Honey production is dropping,
but consumption is soaring?

[man] Honey consumption
has been increasing for two reasons:

because the human population
is increasing;

and the increase in importance
of more natural products.

Honey is used as an ingredient

which gives an added value
to the product,

because it relates the product
to a natural product.

So the name "honey" is an added value.

[slow, moody guitar music]

[narrator] The reality is that
our bodies process honey

more or less the same way
they do all other sugars.

But food makers looking
to please picky consumers

have switched from sugar to honey
to sweeten dozens of products.

Everything from bread to potato chips
to cookies to sliced ham.

Tony Schmitz and his father Doug
started out as beekeepers.

But as the demand for honey increased,
they moved into packing.

We buy honey from beekeepers
from around the world,

and our job is to blend
those honeys together,

making that honey easy
for the food manufacturer to use.

[narrator] American hives produce
about 160 million pounds a year.

But we eat 450 million pounds,

so the US imports
twice as much as it makes.

How much honey is in the tank?

-He's done.
-Open her up.

[Tony Schmitz] There's thousands
of varieties of honey through the world.

A packer's job is to blend different
varieties, colors, types of honeys

in large commercial quantities.

[Doug Schmitz] We're blending honey
over here for a bread company.

We go through the building here,
and pull honey ready to be used.

It's already allotted for the moisture,
the color, the flavor.

Today we're probably going to put
40 barrels of Indian honey in there,

and mix it with a little bit of Vietnam,

finish up with some Canadian honey,
then come up with the flavor profile.

Your spec has got to be exact
all the time.

[narrator] Yes, the number of hives
worldwide is growing.

But honey exports are rising
about eight times faster.

[Norberto] In some way,
there seems to be a surplus of honey.

Where does that honey come from?

If we consider that
the production is decreasing

and the demand is increasing,

the only way to explain that gap

is honey adulteration.

[narrator] It's a simple but ugly truth.

Lots of the honey flowing
around the world... isn't pure honey.

[Norberto] The dilution of honey
with cheap syrups

is the main and more massive way
to adulterate honey.

It is the reason of this apparent surplus
of honey all over the world.

The most important point is to protect
consumers and what they are paying for.

[ominous music]

[narrator] It's straight out of
the drug-dealer playbook:

cut your pure product
with inexpensive filler

to increase volume.

[Norberto] Ten or twenty years ago,

syrups that came from corn
or from sugarcane

were mostly used to adulterate honey.

Around 25 years ago, in the United States,

a method was developed
to detect that type of adulteration.

And then, the Chinese
discovered some years ago

that syrups manufactured from rice

are not detected by this method.

[narrator] China,
the new agricultural powerhouse,

is home to an ancient
and revered honey industry.

By the late '90s, Chinese beekeepers
had close to seven million hives.

A gigantic number by any reckoning.

Between the huge hive count,

and adulteration by some producers
with rice syrup,

the Chinese honey industry
created a massive surplus.

This overflow was then sold
to the world's hungriest honey importer:

the US.

[woman] The Chinese were purposefully
undercutting the market,

selling it at such a low price that
American producers couldn't compete.

That honey may come in
at half the price of the domestic market.

[Doug Schmitz] There was a huge
import problem with really cheap honey

forcing us American producers
out of our market.

I couldn't find a market
for the honey I produced.

[Tony Schmitz] So there was an abundance
of honey on the US market.

The US packers had all their supply needs
taken care of with these cheap imports.

And it was hard as a honey producer
to compete with Chinese imports.

The government felt it was important to
make sure that Americans could continue

to raise bees
and sell the honey profitably.

[narrator] In 2001,
the US Government declared

that Chinese producers were unfairly
"dumping" honey on the US market.

[Susan Berfield] They put
a huge tariff on Chinese honey.

Basically triple the price
if it came from China.

[ship horn blares]

[Norberto] As soon as those
anti-dumping duties were established,

new ways to cheat the rules
were developed,

for example, transshipment of honey
through third countries.

[narrator] Imports from
other Asian countries suddenly surged.

Malaysia exported 37 million pounds
of honey in a single year.

Not a bad haul for a country
where all the bees combined

can only produce about one-tenth
of one percent of that amount.

[Susan] It's very simple.

A barrel comes from China,

they put a different label on it,

they fake the papers,
and they send it on its way.

[Norberto] Consumers are eating
a product that is not honey.

But that passes the official tests.

[church bells ringing]

[narrator] Government testing is rare.

Most lab work is paid for
by importers and packers,

to make sure they're not selling
compromised honey.

They turn to private laboratories
like Bremen-based QSI,

which has been testing honey for quality
and purity since the 1950s.

Germany is the second-largest importer
of honey, after the US,

and German companies are among
the most powerful middlemen

in the global flow of honey.

Here we store all the samples
which we test.

We store them in the meantime half a year.

Samples from beekeepers,
importers, packers or retailers.

Our clients need to label the origin.

We also check dilution,

and test for residues
from feeding the bees medicine,

like antibiotics.

Last year, we have got in total

about 60,000.

We have to taste and smell every sample.

You can really smell, very strongly,

like, a pine honey,
different from a light honey.

A very, very weak floral aroma.

[melodic percussion music]

Hmm.

[narrator] Taste and smell
indicate authenticity,

but to zero in on the country of origin,
the lab runs a pollen analysis.

For every plant species or family,

you have very specific forms of pollen.

This is a sediment
of a Chinese linden honey.

So you can see the typical shape
of the linden pollen.

This is important for the botanical origin
and for the geographical origin.

If you filter out the pollen, so you
cannot trace back anymore the origins,

then you could mix or blend
this filtered honey

and you would not be able
to detect it with pollen analysis.

Every time a new test is developed,

adulterators developed
a new method, a new product,

to make possible
that the tests are cheated.

It's like a competition from those ones
who want to adulterate the honey

and those ones who detect it.

In the very beginning,
if you apply this test,

you see a high percentage
of adulterated honeys

especially from the Asian countries.

This might take two or three months.

Then you see the positive ones decrease.

It does not mean
that they stopped adulteration.

It just means
they have found something new,

which we cannot detect
with the methods we have so far.

[narrator] For years,
American producers complained

that the tariffs on Chinese honey
weren't working.

Cheap diluted honey was still being
shipped from China to third countries

and then to the US,
killing American business.

In 2008, the US government
did something about it.

[man] I started in
the US Attorney's Office in Chicago

on January 7, 2008.

Only a few months into the job,

I had federal agents with the Department
of Homeland Security reach out

and ask me for a search warrant
to search the offices of a company

that I had never heard of before:
Alfred L. Wolff, Inc.

[man] Alfred L. Wolff is an international
import and export trade company.

It's a family owned business

with a long tradition in Hamburg.

I was the National Sales Manager,

trying to sell honey
within the United States.

ALW was a pretty big, if not
the biggest importer of honey at the time.

[Andrew] Large container loads of honey,
Russian honey specifically,

was being imported into the United States
by the Wolff Company.

Very large quantities of that honey had
tested positive as being Chinese honey.

[narrator] The agents dubbed their
investigation "Project Honeygate."

[Andrew] These series of cases,
which went from 2008

until 2014 and 2015,

ended up becoming the largest
food fraud case in US history.

[tense orchestral music]

[narrator] In March 2008, federal agents
raided the Chicago office of A.L. Wolff.

[Susan Berfield]
They come in fully suited, with weapons,

ready to defend themselves
if it should be necessary.

And they seized large volumes
of documents, shipping records,

and electronic data,

as well as samples of honey.

[narrator] Two Wolff executives
suddenly found themselves

in a Homeland Security spotlight.

Magnus Von Buddenbrock
was the US General Manager.

The Head of US Sales
was Stefanie Giesselbach.

[Berfield] Giesselbach was hired by ALW
when she was 19 years old,

and by the time she was 28,

she was given what seemed to her
like a really great assignment:

being transferred from Hamburg to Chicago.

She was going to be
in charge of selling honey.

[narrator] In 2006,
Giesselbach arrived in Chicago

and took over for the outgoing
sales manager, Thomas Gerkmann.

[Thomas Gerkmann]
We had a transfer time of...

four to six weeks.

Sales is a people business.

So of course,

I took the opportunity
to say goodbye to the customers,

and introduce Stefanie
as the new face to the customers.

[tense music]

[narrator] Investigators believed
Giesselbach was a key player

in Wolff's transshipment racket.

And only a few weeks after the raid,
a tip came in

that Giesselbach was skipping town.

[Andrew] She's broken the lease
for her car, cut off the utilities,

she's purchased a plane ticket,
one way, to go back to Germany.

It is very difficult to extradite
a German national from Germany.

We really had
something like 24 or 48 hours

to make a decision about her arrest.

[narrator] Agents pored over thousands
of Wolff company documents,

looking for hard proof that Giesselbach
had knowingly sold illegal honey.

With only hours to spare, they found it.

It was called "Purchase Order 995."

[Andrew] PO 995 is
a purchase order for Polish honey.

Lab reports indicated that
that honey was adulterated

with a prohibited antibiotic
known as chloramphenicol.

[narrator] Chloramphenicol is not
an ingredient used to bulk up shipments.

It's a powerful antibiotic fed to bees
to keep them healthy.

It can be fatal for people
who eat it unwittingly.

Which is why it is illegal in the US
to import food products that contain it.

[Andrew] After Ms. Giesselbach and others
knew that the honey was adulterated,

they went ahead and sold it anyway
at a fire-sale price.

[narrator] The investigators had proof,
but they were almost out of time.

Magnus Von Buddenbrock had just dropped
Giesselbach off at O'Hare Airport.

[Boutros] We are in the judge's chambers

having a-- arrest warrant
and a criminal complaint

sworn out against Ms. Giesselbach,

and while we are doing that,
she was now at the ticket counter,

checking in to get on her plane
to go to Germany.

[narrator] Agents grabbed Giesselbach
before she could board the plane.

Her manager, Magnus Von Buddenbrock,

was pulled over and arrested
minutes later.

After two weeks in a federal cell,
both agreed to cooperate.

[Andrew] Ms. Giesselbach told us

that 85% to 90%, she estimated,

of the honey that Alfred L. Wolff
was bringing into the United States

was part of some kind of criminal scheme.

When I first heard it,

I thought it couldn't be possible.

It is a misunderstanding.

[narrator] But Giesselbach named
her co-conspirators.

One of those names was Thomas Gerkmann.

[Susan] Stefanie, in her plea agreement,

described a period of about two months

that was pretty explicitly set up

to allow Thomas Gerkmann to show her

how the transshipping scheme worked.

I was not an import manager,
I was National Sales Manager,

so my job was to try to initial sales
in the United States.

The import business was not my business.

[interviewer] There are emails
that indicate that you were involved

in deliberately transshipping
Chinese honey to the United States.

What are your thoughts on these emails
and these allegations?

Well, I don't know exactly
about these emails.

I just know that the computers
of Alfred L. Wolff in the office

were open to everybody,

so signatures can be replaced.

[narrator] But there is one signature
that Gerkmann admits was not replaced.

According to investigators,
purchase order 995

directly links Gerkmann
to the honey laundering.

[Thomas] This issue, I remember quite well

because I got a claim from the customer

that the honey is contaminated
with an antibiotic.

He made a test at a local laboratory.

I sent this analysis to my US boss,

as well as to the head office in Hamburg,

asking what I should do with this claim.

They came back to me, both of them,

and said I should try to sell it

with a discount to the customer,

which I did,

and then this case was closed.

Today, I would say,
after knowing all this,

I shouldn't have accepted...

this instruction.

[narrator] Giesselbach was sentenced
to a year and a day in federal prison.

Von Buddenbrock was sentenced
to six months' home confinement

and three years' probation.

Gerkmann was indicted,

but living in Bremen, he was
beyond the reach of US law enforcement.

The total number of individuals
and companies that were charged were 27.

Of those 27,
9 defendants pleaded guilty.

Ten defendants are fugitives.

[Thomas] I am a very religious person.

And in the Bible, we have a saying.

"People are thinking,
but God is showing the way."

And this is how I'm living,
and how I try to live with it.

The only...

the only impact I have

is that I'm not able to leave Germany.

That's all.

This was not a victimless crime.

This was a crime
that impacted everyday people

who were working
in the domestic honey industry.

Honey producers, who were
just trying to make an honest dollar.

[Clint] It affects every beekeeper,

because the consumer can
no longer trust the marketplace.

Crime is dynamic.

You cannot combat crime this year,
and forget it.

[narrator] Most honey-packers regularly
send out samples of their merchandise

for quality testing.

Although it's not required by law,
it's how they protect their business,

by making sure they're not selling
a compromised product.

We're buying honey
from about 11 different countries

and too many suppliers to count.

Every country has different known risks.

Every time a truck comes to the dock door

one of the first things we always do
is randomly pull some drums off the truck

and get some testing on the way.

Looks like some yummy honey, Tony.

And there, like this.

[Tony] We're defending ourselves
against food fraud.

So we don't associate ourselves
with any suppliers

that are selling honey from Thailand,

Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia...

It's real low in moisture.

That is some thick stuff.

We have a very strong assumption that
Chinese shippers will use those countries

as... we call them puddle points,
or surrogate countries,

to circumvent their honey
through those countries.

We're seeing shipments
that we don't believe are authentic.

There's our sample right there.

Our testing procedure
and our defense mechanisms

caught a shipment of Vietnamese honey

that we later proved
that was transshipped from Taiwan.

Now, our quality control people
were doing their jobs

and noticed that the paperwork

and the tests that were sent
with that shipment

just didn't match up with our tests.

So we alerted the proper authorities.

Customs and Border Protection Labs
concluded

that the honey in fact was
of Chinese origin.

[driving music]

[narrator] In recent years,

the QSI laboratory
has developed a screening method

that's much harder to beat.

Nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR,

measures the magnetic fields
of individual atoms

to create a kind of molecular fingerprint.

These are cross-checked
against QSI's growing database

of honeys from around the world.

[woman] I always describe it
as a perfect screening method

because you see a lot
with just one measurement.

With the green spots here,

you can see that the models are positive.

So the honey is coming from China.

You see here,

really good buckwheat honey
coming from the US,

and you can see the high amino acids
here and here,

and even the sugars
are perfectly fitting the red line.

If you compare this
with the honey we just measured,

doesn't fit at all.

We can see it's really low here.

This honey looks adulterated.

We have a lot of syrup in the honey.

[narrator] For now,
it's an effective tool.

But that doesn't mean the honey crooks
won't find a way to beat it.

With money to be had, there will always
be fraud in the marketplace.

We look at that and say,
"If I can't convince the consumer

that I have a healthy and clean
and wholesome and good for you product,

that I'm legitimately delivering
into the marketplace,

then I've lost my source of income."

My vocation is of no value if I lose that.

[narrator] At best, the value
of beekeeping is already in question.

Beekeepers have had to push
their colonies to the limit

just to stay in the black.

[Lloyd Cunniff] I started working bees
when I was 13 years old.

I started working for my grandfather.

1973, I guess it would be.

We're lucky in Montana that our honey is
real high quality and highly sought after.

We had a drought, and we had some problems
with colony collapse with our bees.

So we went from a little under
a thousand colonies of bees

down to... well, we had 489 colonies left.

When a beekeeping operation
experiences numbers

like 40, 50% loss
throughout the course of a year,

the method that we use
to rebuild our operation is to split...

creating an artificial hive
in a smaller unit.

Taking one hive and making
three or four, or five out of it,

depending on time of year
and strength of the parent colony.

[atmospheric percussion music]

[Buzz] How's it going?

[worker] Hopefully she'll lay tonight
and we'll have two empty ones

to clean up.

[Buzz] Almost.

[Buzz] Oh, you're in luck.
I found the queen on the first pull.

She's going to be laying
all the eggs she can lay,

you know, twice her body weight
in eggs a day.

The bees will just feed her.

She never stops laying eggs.
She can just keep on going in her prime.

That can be about 2,000 eggs a day.

So all the little bees here...
come from her.

We put a new frame in
for her to lay eggs in every day.

[Buzz] Those are the larvae there.
The bees are feeding that larvae.

They put the food
at the bottom of the cell

and that larvae is eating it all the time.

When they cap it off
they're done feeding it,

and that larvae
is then pupating into a bee

and it will hatch out of that cell
as a bee ready to go to work.

[bees buzzing]

[narrator] For the next month,
instead of making honey,

these colonies will work
from dawn to dusk as pollinators.

That's the other task
bees have evolved to perform,

and it is suddenly immensely valuable.

Back in 1990, California had about
400,000 acres of almond orchards.

Now it has more than a million acres.

[Clint Walker] Almond pollination
is the key financial driver

in the beekeeping industry right now.

Honey is not paying the bills.

Most beekeepers could not be profitable
producing honey alone.

[narrator] At around $200 per hive,

a beekeeper can make tens of thousands
of dollars from their bees in a few weeks.

Enough to keep their honey operations
from failing.

[Lloyd] Every one of those sticks
out there is a small almond tree.

They just keep planting them.

Guys are out there
working in the field right now.

They just keep tearing out more... crops,

and putting in almonds.

There's such a market for them.

I don't know how long it can last,

but they got a lot of almond trees
planted in this country.

[narrator] Chances are,
it's going to last a while.

Trends in healthy eating are driving
many consumers toward almond milk

and almond flour.

All of this has been a windfall
for the almond business.

And those millions of trees
can't make almonds

unless their blossoms
are visited by honeybees.

[quiet buzzing]

[Buzz] We put in about 3,000 hives
into the almonds.

At two hives an acre,
that does about 1,500 acres.

So we're just inspecting the bees,
the colonies.

We're feeding them because
it's been cold and wet.

We supplement them with the sugar syrup.

The almond trees
don't put out a lot of nectar.

They do a lot of pollen.

They're burning more calories
than they're bringing in,

so they start using up their stores
rapidly, this time of the year.

So the bloom is moving along
pretty rapidly.

They will be here ten days to two weeks,
then we'll be moving them out.

[narrator] Nature usually provides enough
bees to pollinate any ordinary orchard.

But thousands of trees
require bees by the truckload.

There are about
two and a half million hives in the US.

Every January, most of them
are loaded onto trucks...

and brought here

to pollinate California's almond farms.

[mandolin and harp music]

[woman]
A lot of beekeepers now are migratory.

They come as far as Pennsylvania, Florida,

to California, to pollinate the almonds.

-[woman] Enjoy your stay.
-I will.

[woman] How long
are you going to be here?

-Probably today.
-Then home?

-Then home.
-[woman] OK.

Enjoy.

Most large commercial
beekeeping operations

feel that it's a necessity
that they migrate their bees

to the Central Valley of California
in February and March, each year.

[narrator] This annual migration
may be saving the honey business,

but it also puts it at very real risk.

For one month every year,
much of the pollinating power in the US,

crucial for foods
from apples to broccoli to strawberries,

is brought to one tiny pocket
of the country.

All the hives coming here is, like,

bringing all the problems
from different places, you know?

It's like bringing everybody
from the airport all into your home.

[Lloyd] Your bees come and get mixed
with bees from all over the United States.

And you get too much livestock
in one area,

and you can pass the diseases
back and forth amongst them.

[Clint]
It's an intensely agricultural area.

There are a lot of chemicals being used.

There are fungicides
that are often sprayed in the almond grove

during the time that the bees
are pollinating the almonds.

It can be very deadly
for the honeybee colonies,

and then even more costly
for the beekeeper

who shipped bees across the country
to get them there

to do the pollination job.

[narrator] In January 2017,

beekeepers' fears about concentrating
so many bees in one place were realized,

but not in a way that most had expected.

I'm considered a honey producer.
I'm not really a pollinator.

But prices of honey the last
couple of years, they started sliding.

The reason we came to California this year

was to make up for the short honey crop
that we had last summer in Montana.

We didn't come last year.

We stayed home with our bees and kept them
in a big building over winter.

But this year we thought we'd try
to cash in on the pollination money.

[woman] I've known Lloyd
probably 30 years.

Our agreement is that

I would take care of his bees here,
place them in the orchards.

They came in a semi,

and we placed them
in one of our bee yards,

and then he flew out and they started
what we call "working them."

[Lloyd] I'm medicating them
and feeding them syrup.

I never have good luck with the bees.

Their health, they seem to go backwards
when they get down here.

This year was different.
The bees looked good.

That first day we worked on half the bees.

I went home that night,
called my wife back home,

and told her that the bees looked good,
that we were looking good for the spring.

They were superior.
I never had bees like that.

Monday morning, Casey and I came out here
and we started working here.

This was the first location
where the bees were sitting.

There was 120 colonies of bees here.

But they're spread out.

The bees are dropped off
in these four different drops.

There's 120 colonies in a drop.

The next morning we came out
at 8:30 in the morning.

A really foggy day, that day.

We just drove down this road.

I get a phone call from him
around eight o'clock

and he says, "Where are my bees?"

And I thought he was joking with me.

I said, "You're pulling my leg."
And he said, "No. They're gone.

They're not here anymore."

[Lloyd] And every place where they were
sitting the day before, they were gone.

It is devastating because for him,
it was everything he had.

Then she called the Sheriff's Department
and had them come out.

So we just waited around here,
and while we were waiting,

we got to snooping and walking around,

and we found the labeling the Strachans
had put on the side of the hives

that had their name
and their contact numbers and stuff.

So when they came,
they peeled all the evidence off.

They had time to do that,

so it had to be
a pretty good-sized crew of guys.

Probably at least four guys,
I would think.

[narrator] Lloyd Cunniff learned
that his bees were only the latest stolen

in a string of hive heists
in almond country

stretching back four years.

[man] Based on the information,
we believe that it's another beekeeper.

It's kind of the perfect crime,

because you have to know how
to handle bees and have the equipment

to move and transport those bees.

[Lloyd] Just figure, an average honey crop
off of those colonies of bees

would be over $100,000.

Pollination money is obviously gone,
because I never did it.

Somebody else got paid for it.

The reason I wanted to tell this story
is I wanted to get the word out

to try to save somebody else
from going through this.

[birds chirping]

[narrator] In May 2017,
news outlets reported

that police had found over 2,000 hives

stolen from sites
in California's Central Valley.

[reporter] It wasn't the sound, but rather
the sight of these mismatched beehives

that drew attention and ultimately helped
crack a massive heist.

[narrator] Police identified two suspects:

Pavel Tveretinov and Vitaliy Yeroshenko.

Tveretinov is a honey broker

whose own pollination business
had closed two years before.

Both men were charged with nine counts
of receiving stolen property.

Police recovered 2,500 beehives

worth an estimated $875,000,

which had been stolen
over a three-year period.

But even in the wake
of this bald-faced bee larceny,

most beekeepers remained
helplessly hooked on the almond money.

But not all.

[Clint] A few years ago,
we decided we would like

to try to take ourselves
out of the pollination treadmill.

We wanted to explore
a different business model

where we could be closer to home,

closer to our customer
that's buying our honey,

producing honey more locally.

And so about six years ago,

we stopped going to California almonds
for pollination

and the bees tend to be healthier
over the course of the year.

People come to us for honey that was
produced by our bees on the honey farm.

The customer we love
is the one we interact with,

we get to educate about honey.

[Clint] See them dancing?

Here's one right here.

She's trying to tell the other bees
what to go get, and what direction.

-Look at that one.
-They dance.

[boy] Does it change?

It changes according to the direction
she is trying to send them.

More of us are wanting to buy food
that we know the source of,

that was produced
sustainably and ethically.

Would you try our local wildflower?

Sure.

[Clint] This is what the bees produce
right here on the black land,

a few miles from the shop.

-Isn't that a nice honey?
-The one I want.

-Can we have it?
-[Clint] Can you have it?

You can taste any honey I've got.

[narrator] Between foreign competition,
honey adulteration,

agricultural pressures, and outlying
crimes like the California bee heists,

beekeepers can be forgiven
for worrying that their business

may be too challenging to survive.

[harp music]

[Lloyd]
With the beekeeping industry in general,

all the issues of transshipment
and adulteration

really create a situation

in which it's very difficult
for any beekeeping operation

to be financially successful
as a honey-production-only model.

[narrator] And yet the romance of the bees
still works its magic.

Many of those who make our honey
do it not for great profits,

but because there is still an ancient
and serene mystery to the process.

[Norberto] When you speak to a person

that doesn't know anything about bees,

but you tell that you are a beekeeper,

immediately that person
becomes interested

and wants to ask more and more,

and I think that is
the romance of beekeeping.

In part it is a commercial activity,

but in part...

it's a way of living.

[tense orchestral music]