Some area beekeepers have lost all their hives
Climate change, insecticides, loss of habitat have made for ‘perfect storm’
Tom Childs likes to keep his ear to the ground on any news of spring bee loss. This year, the buzz hasn’t been good.
“I know people just outside of town, in Douro and in Buckhorn … they’ve lost all their hives, like 16 hives, and they had done everything a beekeeper should do. They provided them with supplemental sugar water, they treated for varroa mites, they did everything,” Childs said.
But this year has been particularly distressing in the industry, here, across Canada, and into the U.S., he said.
“This year is the worst year of honeybee loss in North America.”
Childs, an administrator on the Peterborough Beekeepers Facebook page, got his start back in 2015 when Peterborough GreenUp launched a community beekeeper program.
It was basically an adult educational program where they set up hives in six different locations throughout Peterborough, including the Ecology Park, near Rogers Cove, Holy Cross Secondary School and the Greenwood United Church.
“It was a program to get people into learning about bees and beekeeping and we worked as groups. It was a full-year program when it started, and it ran for three or four seasons.”
Some of those hives are still in place, monitored by volunteers like Childs. He now works with a group looking after hives behind the Mount Community Centre.
In the last few years, he said there’s been an explosion of interest in beekeeping.
“The Peterborough community has really responded well to it.”
But it has also coincided with a stretch of devastating years in the industry.
It’s estimated that in the world today, there are between 20,000 and 30,000 species of bees, with about 4,000 species native to North America, Childs said. Up to 75 per cent of our crops rely on bees and other pollinators, like butterflies.
But in recent years, he said, all pollinators are seeing a dramatic drop in their populations due to climate change, use of insecticides, loss of habitat and other factors. “And the main culprit of all this damage is humans.”
The industry, as a whole, has been trying to address the issue in recent years, he said.
“They’re doing everything to try and turn it around, but they also recognize that there’s a lot of factors beyond their control. Climate change is the biggest thing.”
There are awareness programs aimed at some of the causes, he said. People are more educated on the issue every year. And some reaction has just risen from devastating loss after loss.
Childs has been involved in a local program trying to get children involved in beekeeping — a move some European countries have been leading for a while now.
In the U.S., he said, it’s not uncommon now to see truckloads of bees transported from the east coast to places like California to help pollinate almond crops, then after a few weeks, they’re trucked up to Oregon to pollinate orchards.
In Asia, in areas where bee populations have been totally wiped out, farmers remove pollen from trees and they hand pollinate their crops.
“It’s really devastating,” Childs said. “Some of the commercial beekeepers within our region have 600, 1,000, 1,200 hives. So, it’s their livelihood. I know two apiaries — one is like 40 years old, and one just started 12 years ago — they’ve had it. They shut their beekeeping businesses down because they can’t make a living out of it anymore.”