Queen’s bees in crime sting
HALF a million bees due to be transferred to Balmoral next month have vanished from a royal beekeeper’s farm.
Murray McGregor, who kept the bees at Learilaw Farm, near Broxburn, West Lothian, and has 250 hives at Balmoral, believes they were taken because of their rising value of £5,000.
Two years of wet weather, combined with the varroa destructor mite, which has been destroying bee colonies across the UK, have reduced the population of domestic honey bees by 30 per cent since 2007.
Mr McGregor said : “You would need specialist knowledge to do this so it would have to be a beekeeper .”