NATICK - The crime scene was peaceful and bucolic, bordered by fields of new green seedlings and a brook full of ducks; home to scampering piglets and bleating baby goats.

But it was in Natick this month, on the rustic, well-kept grounds of the town-owned organic farm, that someone tried to steal an increasingly precious commodity: a hive full of honeybees ramping up for honey season.

The thief made off with a heap of expensive beekeeping equipment, one of the farm's beekeepers said, but the bees were lucky. Something apparently spooked - or stung - their would-be abductor, who left the farm without taking the full hive he or she had prepared to steal by moving it off its foundation and nailing its sections together.

"They've been through a rough start to the season," Ryan Williams, a beekeeper at Natick Community Organic Farm, said yesterday as the bees buzzed in and out of holes in their hive. "It stresses them out to be moved around and left out in the elements like that. . . . But they're tough little creatures."

A Natick police spokesman did not return a phone call yesterday. One of the farm's directors has said she believes the thief is a beekeeper, because of the skill used to prepare the hive for removal from the property.

Honeybees have become more valuable in recent years, as their ranks have been decimated by a mysterious, devastating affliction known as "colony collapse disorder," which has wiped out swaths of the nation's hives since it surfaced in 2004.

The resulting pressure on the industry has led to beehive thefts around the country, especially in California, where thefts have cost beekeepers hundreds of thousands of dollars and where legislators have proposed stricter civil and criminal penalties for stealing or damaging beehives.

In New England, where the number of amateur beekeepers has skyrocketed in recent years, such crimes remain rare, state and county beekeepers' groups said.

"I've never heard of anyone trying to steal bees, and I've been in this business for 25 years," said Mary Wilson, owner of Bee Busters, a bee- and insect-removal company in Acton who also keeps bees for a hobby.

The collapsing hives have drawn attention to honeybees' importance to the food supply. Without bees to pollinate crops, said Williams, the Natick beekeeper, many of the foods sold in supermarkets could not be produced.

Maine blueberry growers, for example, use about 50,000 hives of honeybees to pollinate their fields each spring and have faced sharply increasing rental prices for the hives because of the bees' scarcity. At its summer peak, an active hive contains some 50,000 bees who busily collect nectar from flowers to make honey.

At the 27-acre organic farm in Natick, which is open to the public, a handful of parents brought their toddlers yesterday to play with the piglets. Honey made by the resident bees is sold at the farm, along with organic vegetables, herbs, milk, meat, maple syrup, and flowers.

Williams said he does not believe anyone who knows the farm well would steal from it. But the shock of the crime has left wariness in its wake.

"There are going to be people on the lookout now," he said.