Former police officer on EIT beekeeping course says missing honey a clear case of theft

Students of the EIT Hawke's Bay campus beekeeping course on the day of discovering the theft. Photo / Supplied

A former police officer on an EIT beekeeping course says the mysterious disappearance of the students' honey is theft.

Mike Faulkner was a police sergeant in the UK for 16 years, and spent much of that time investigating neighbourhood crime.

He said he and the other students have found EIT's response to the theft to be disappointing.

EIT have said they were unsure whether the honey was stolen and were investigating the disappearance, described as a ''very unusual situation."

EIT Head of School Primary Industries Nigel Udy has headed the investigation and has spoken to students on the course.

The course tutor has also been consulting with students.

Udy said EIT had not discounted reporting the missing honey to police, pending further information coming to light.

He declined to comment on Faulkner's assertion.

Earlier, Udy had said it seemed very unlikely that the culprit was a thief because of the way frames were taken, and replaced.

"If I was a thief, I don't think I would have done that."

"A true thief would take the bees, the most valuable component of a hive is the bees and the hive itself."

Faulkner said police needed to know what had happened.

"Honey doesn't just go missing, yes the bees can eat it but that hasn't happened here, we know what that looks like, this has been taken, it's stolen.

"It doesn't matter that they've replaced the frames with some brand new frames. They've taken our frames and our honey, which is theft."

He said students were expecting each of the 15 or so hives to produce between 20 and 30 frames of honey or more than 30kg of honey per hive.

"Instead of 30 plus kilos of honey each, we ended up getting 12kg."

He said even though it was nearly certain they would never catch the culprit, it was still important to report the theft to police.

"It's about building up an intelligence picture. We might have had 20 thefts of honey in the area this summer and nobody has reported it to the police because they're worried nobody is going to do anything about it.''

He said it had been a season of fairly poor harvests and the honey stolen was worth a couple of thousand dollars wholesale.

"It's impacted on a group of students who are learning how to be beekeepers and it leaves us with a bit of a sour taste really."

He said that while he knew there was no easy way to solve the situation students had been left feeling EIT wasn't acknowledging the problem.