Alberta Bee News
December 2021
THE PANDEMIC THAT BROKE THE HON EY BEE SUPPLY CHAIN
Commercial flights were also cancelled or delayed, providing fewer options for getting the packages that were produced where they needed to go. In 2021, rerouted airline networks and permitting delays meant that there was a scarcity of packaged bees yet again. According to a survey of over 200 beekeepers, disruptions associated with the pandemic have seriously impacted beekeepers’ abilities to make ends meet. This pandemic has made woefully clear that the Canadian beekeeping industry is vulnerable and unsustainable in its current form. Even without transportation disruptions, shipping is risky – occasionally, and devastatingly, entire pallets of bees with over 600 packages, about 5 million bees, have died due to cargo mishandling. This spring, a shipment to Vancouver was cancelled because the importers deemed the risk of bee death to be too high.
By Alison McAfee, postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Entomology & Plant Pathology, North Carolina State University https://
“We should be able to have a sustainable, domestic supply of honey bee stock,” says Dr. Mark Winston, professor and senior fellow at Simon Fraser University. “We demonstrated years ago that nucleus and package bee production in BC is economically feasible,” he explains, pointing to work he and his colleagues published as far back as 1985 suggesting that BC could fulfill a substantial fraction of Canada’s livestock demand. Now, that time may have come.
alisonmcafeeblogs.wordpress.com/2021/05/12/the-pandemicthat-broke-the-honey-bee-supply-chain/
Canada’s beekeeping industry is vulnerable to border closures and we need a sustainable, domestic supply If you were a cattle rancher, and every winter a quarter of your animals perished, you would have a problem. Now, say your replacement livestock depended on annual cargo shipments from the other side of the planet, and you might decide that approach to farming just wasn’t viable.
Apiculture is not a siloed activity – it also supports a much bigger agricultural sector, and a shortage of honey bees could lead to a pollination deficit for crops. Blueberries, for example, are Canada’s top fruit export, and with a farmgate value at ~$250 million annually, they are BC’s biggest crop. However, they are also one of beekeepers’ first major pollination contracts, making blueberries among the crops most at risk of a shortage of early spring bees.
Welcome to beekeeping. According to the annual colony loss survey conducted by the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists (CAPA), 20-30% of Canada’s honey bee colonies perish each winter. And beekeepers normally replace those colonies with packages originating from New Zealand, Australia, and Chile. The Canadian beekeeping industry depends on this international honey bee distribution system to survive, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, its weaknesses are in full view.
Later, in the prairies, honey bees are employed in canola hybrid seed production – seed which supports the nation’s multibillion dollar canola industry. The list goes on. A pollination deficit has the potential to ripple across commodities, affecting not only beekeepers, but farmers and consumers, too.
In the spring of 2020, with cargo flights grounded and COVID-19 sweeping the country, only one third of the package bee orders placed by Canadian beekeepers were fulfilled. Beekeepers’ umbilical supply of new livestock was snipped, leaving us scrambling to find the colonies we needed to fill pollination contracts. In 2021, even fewer packages were imported than in 2020 – about one fifth as many as in 2019.
This is not the first time that Canadian beekeepers experienced a sudden severance of livestock supply, and it won’t be the last. Fifty years ago, many beekeepers routinely euthanized their colonies in order to skirt the challenge of overwintering bees in Canada’s harsh prairie climate. About half of our colonies that had been killed each fall were replaced in the spring with packages imported from the U.S. That practice halted, though, when another pandemic struck.
In some cases, exporters were unable to produce the orders, owing to their own travel restrictions and labour shortages. 10
