Dirty Money is a similarly themed one about corruption -- the first season covered a great maple syrup heist, Allergan pharmaceuticals, a Payday loan criminal, HSBC's cartel connections, the VW NoX emissions scandal, and Trump's business career.
Yup. Motion sensitive cameras, stamped frames with your details and the odd gps locator hidden in frames. It’s bad in New Zealand with the honey being very valuable (though less than half what the article cites, we use NZ dollars, which are worth half as much as US ones).
A fair portion of thefts have been performed by staff at companies too, so that’s worth keeping in mind. Also, get on with neighbours. Putting masses of hives up against a propert boundary, specifically to target Manuka that’s grown next door tends to rile people up.
Better still, jam all GPS, GNSS, GPRS and 3G and 4G signals, along with 2.4, 5 Ghz and LoRa bands just to be sure. Specialized car thieves are already doing it, hive thieves probably not yet. Tracking and removing the tracker is more difficult and can be done later.
Remote systems could throw an alert if the tracking devices go dark past a timeout period. At a minimum, authorities could be quickly alerted with the last known location of the hives.
I don’t think you can really do that. Jamming mostly targets a receiver. Disrupting the signal that’s emitted by a tracking device would make you really easy to triangulate and find.
Jamming the GPS receiver or anything else on site would trigger an alert. Then law enforcement has a very small amount of time to arrive at a very remote location...
Let's say the amortized cost of a GPS tracker is, conservatively/high-end with a lifetime data plan for updates every hour: $100. Let's say the cost of mean average deployment is $10. Then the break-even point for hive theft is reached if losses are well over 7.33 (bar) %. (110/1500)
If losses are high, beekeepers will deploy them. If losses are low, deploying GPS would be more of a fear-based, emotional decision than a rational one.
The other piece of the puzzle is how meaningful the loss is; if such a theft is existentially threatening, and there's a reasonable chance of it, then it may still be deployed despite not actually saving money.
Exactly. Expected payoff is only useful if you have infinite resources. This is why most of us pay for insurance even though in the long run it's guaranteed to cost more than just self-funding any repairs or replacements.
in the long run it's guaranteed to cost more than just self-funding any repairs or replacements
If you're talking about home insurance then this is certainly not guaranteed. The primary purpose of home insurance is not in any case to safe you money on small repairs but to protect you from a total loss, say from fire.
I mean, if you are at fault in an accident where several people sustain life-changing injuries, or your home is a total loss, or whatever, then you probably did end coming out ahead with the insurance. Insurance makes the most sense for perils which would be catastrophic for you.
It depends on the distribution of thefts and % coverage.
If the losses are high enough, higher % of trackers would increase ROI (up to a point, depending if trackers were cheap enough). If losses are low enough or trackers very expensive, a few trackers here and there would insure against infrequent "cleaned out" thefts, e.g., serious illness healthcare insurance.
Only for that use case. From a logistics standpoint, which seems so important to the "modern beekeeper", it sounds like an easy thing to say yes to.
The question of "where are my bees?" can have a real-time answer and carries the benefit of knowing the temperature, humidity and other data available from remote sensors.
No need for lifetime data plan. You only equip some of the hives with trackers just when you're moving them to almond cultures where most thefts in the US occur.
Netflix's Rotten S01E01 covers much of the same material.