Alberta beekeepers decimated by weather, COVID-19
Border closures have made it more difficult for temporary foreign workers to travel
The province’s beekeepers are feeling the sting of the COVID-19 pandemic coupled with major losses over the winter, the Alberta Beekeepers Commission says.
Connie Phillips, executive director of the commission, said beekeepers experienced large overwintering losses of bees and were affected by a cold, wet start to their season in April. To add to that, beekeepers have not been able to replenish their supply of honeybees due to border closures and have less help from temporary foreign workers.
“In some cases up north, there are a few guys that have lost close to somewhere between 80 to 90 per cent of their bees,” Phillips said. “I think an overall average, we’re looking at about a 60 per cent loss. And at this point, and it’s anecdotal, we might be losing 50,000 to 60,000 hives in total once we get all the counts in.”
Phillips said last year’s registration had about 305,000 hives. If beekeepers lose upwards of 60,000 hives, that will put Alberta’s hive count to pre-2010 numbers.
Then, when the federal government closed the borders in mid-march due to the pandemic, Phillips said the move created challenges for beekeepers getting temporary foreign workers and shipping in packages of bees and queens.
“I think within a couple of weeks, the federal government had given an exemption to agricultural workers, seasonal workers and so they could start coming in, but there was still a challenge in getting them here,” Phillips said.
“Despite the fact our government said, ‘Yeah, it’s OK for the workers to come here,’ the different countries
they were coming from all were putting their own rules in place and their precautions and that kind of stuff. So that delayed in many cases workers getting here when it’s kind of the critical time for beekeepers in the spring, when they actually need them here.”
While workers can now come, they still need to quarantine for two weeks, which creates more delays, Phillips said.
“It’s kind of pushing the whole start of the season back a month. And the big downside to that was with a lack of workers, in some cases bees were just starving because when they first come out in the spring, there’s no forage and the beekeepers feed them,” Phillips said.
Phillips said they requested help from the Agriculture Ministry, and on May 7 the province announced some supports for Alberta beekeepers.
“We are looking at a 30-per-cent support for hives from neighbouring provinces, in Saskatchewan and in B.C., to be able to help the beekeepers here in Alberta to build up their hives,” said Devin Dreeshen, minister of agriculture and forestry, during the daily COVID-19 update.
“In addition to that, we are also looking at bringing in bees from around the world as well, also mainland U.S. to be able to build up our hives.”
Phillips is hopeful for the support, but it might come too late.
“You’ll miss the first part of the year, this first month, in which bees would be making honey. There just won’t be as many bees making honey,” Phillips said.
“It’s a big, big impact. This whole COVID thing has been a big impact.”
Meanwhile, the province’s 321 native bees are being closely monitored by the Alberta Native Bee Council.
Megan Evans, president of the council, said about 50 per cent of the province’s native bees are doing OK, while the other 50 per cent are declining or they’re so data deficient officials can’t assign a conservation status ranking to them.
“About a quarter of them are incredibly deficient and less than a quarter are declining,” Evans said. “That means they’re either vulnerable, imperilled or critically imperilled, and that’s according to the general status of species in Canada, which is a federal resource that’s updated every five years.”
Some of the reasons for that decline, Evans said, is due to loss of habitat and spread of diseases.
“We need to have the diversity in the landscape that (the bees) evolved with when you have complex diverse landscapes. And in some cases, we don’t do that,”
Evans said. “In some agricultural systems, we’ve taken what was once native grassland, which was a beautiful, diverse ecosystem, and we’ve made it the opposite ... We put in a crop field.”
Evans said if there’s a flowering crop, it’s not a great habitat for the bees because it only provides food for three to four weeks out of the summer while it’s flowering.
However, it’s not all bad news. Through the council’s monitoring efforts, in partnership with the province, they were able to add a new bumblebee to the species list.
“One of our colleagues at the sampling that was done with (Alberta) Environment and Parks found an endangered bee that hadn’t been recorded in the province for 20 years, which is huge,” Evans said.
“It’s a huge step in helping with the conservation of these bees.”