Man in court over hive theft

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branch and started swinging it.

“He caught a couple of the boys across the back and then he had a go at one of our utes. He cracked the windscreen and damaged one of the side panels.”

However, the team’s efforts got the right result.

On Thursday, Nathan David Churton was charged and convicted in Whanganui District Court with receiving property valued at over $1000.

Judge Dugald Matheson sentenced Churton to 170 hours of community work, six months’ community detention and ordered him to pay $4600 in reparation.

Hudson estimated that the stolen hives would be worth $50,000 and was delighted that 60 of the 64 hives were recovered.

They were lucky to get them back, he said, because after hives are stolen there is generally only a 24-hour window of opportunity to salvage them before the evidence is destroyed.

“We were able to load them back into our vehicles the night we found them,” he said. “It was a long night and we didn’t have our bee suits so we had to load them up by hand which is a bit of fun. The bees were in a pretty bad way, they took a bit of strengthening up, but we were stoked just to get them back.”

Hudson said thefts of beehives in Whanganui and surrounding areas had become quite common, though it was slowing down now.

“Getting a conviction . . . we can probably chalk up a tick in the win column — not just for us, but the industry as a whole.

Since the offending, Settlers Honey have upped their security on site properties by installing cameras and placing GPS trackers in their equipment.