Mendax was in denial and it wasn't until the police had
   slipped past him into the house that the reality of the situation
   slowly began to sink in. Mendax's mind started to work again.

   The disks. The damn disks. The beehive.

   An avid apiarist, Mendax kept his own hive. Bees fascinated him. He
   liked to watch them interact, to see their sophisticated social
   structure. So it was with particular pleasure that he enlisted their
   help in hiding his hacking activities. For months he had meticulously
   secreted the disks in the hive. It was the ideal location--unlikely,
   and well guarded by 60000 flying things with stings. Though he hadn't
   bought the hive specifically for hiding stolen computer account
   passwords for the likes of the US Air Force 7th Command Group in the
   Pentagon, it appeared to be a secure hiding place.

   He had replaced the cover of the super box, which housed the
   honeycomb, with a sheet of coloured glass so he could watch the bees
   at work. In summer, he put a weather protector over the glass. The
   white plastic cover had raised edges and could be fastened securely to
   the glass sheet with metal clasps. As Mendax considered his
   improvements to the bee box, he realised that this hive could provide
   more than honey. He carefully laid out the disks between the glass and
   the weather protector. They fitted perfectly in the small gap.

   Mendax had even trained the bees not to attack him as he removed and
   replaced the disks every day. He collected sweat from his armpits on
   tissues and then soaked the tissues in a sugar water solution. He fed
   this sweaty nectar to the bees. Mendax wanted the bees to associate
   him with flowers instead of a bear, the bees' natural enemy.

   But on the evening of the AFP raid Mendax's incriminating disks were
   in full view on the computer table and the officers headed straight
   for them. Ken Day couldn't have hoped for better evidence. The disks
   were full of stolen userlists, encrypted passwords, cracked passwords,
   modem telephone numbers, documents revealing security flaws in various
   computer systems, and details of the AFP's own investigation--all from
   computer systems Mendax had penetrated illegally.

   Mendax's problems weren't confined to the beehive disks. The last
   thing he had done on the computer the day before was still on screen.
   It was a list of some 1500 accounts, their passwords, the dates that
   Mendax had obtained them and a few small notes beside each one.