"I mean, how hard can it be to find someone who has stolen a million bees? Surely he’ll be in a hospital, swollen beyond all recognition and moaning the low moan of deep, relentless agony." By Jeremy Clarkson

Alarming news from the north. Last week someone broke into a field on the outskirts of Knutsford in Cheshire and stole a hundred mummy and baby sheeps. The farmer’s wife is distraught as one of the stolen animals was a pet. And they took its new lamb as well. It’s all just too heartbreaking for words.

And it’s by no means an isolated incident. Just a few days earlier in Lancashire, a farmer in Ramsbottom — I’m afraid I’m not making that up — woke up one morning to find that someone had half-inched 271 of his flock. Meanwhile, in Wales 200 were nicked, a similar number went missing in the Borders, and in Cumbria alone 15 farmers have been targeted. It seems, then, that up north, sheep are the new bullion.

It’s not just sheep, though. In Tamworth, Staffordshire, someone has been nicking piglets; in Norfolk Mrs Queen lost £15,000-worth of cows; and in Shropshire some chap rang the police the other day to say someone had stolen 800,000 of his bees. That’s on top of the 500,000 bees that were stolen from Lothian last June. At this rate I may have to think about fitting a burglar alarm to my tortoise.

So what’s going on here, and, more importantly, why has no one yet been caught? I mean, how hard can it be to find someone who has stolen a million bees? Surely he’ll be in a hospital, swollen beyond all recognition and moaning the low moan of deep, relentless agony.

I want to catch him, frankly, because stealing someone’s bees is a bit like stealing someone’s eczema flakes. What exactly are you going to do with them?
From The Sunday Times,continue reading