Scammers are everywhere. Entirely possible some beekeepers split their hives and then declared them non-viable. However, one thing not noted about this was that the period in which the loss occurred ended April 30th.  Not too often I'd be splitting by then. You might find a few drones flying mid-May, depending.  Our average temperatures at that time are about 18 C, just barely enough for a mating flight. Also, you have to have records of the hives, including where they were. I had to fax in a report of where my yards were and how many hives per yard, and then another report of the losses and where they were. No one asked to come and look, but they have the right to, and to see the detailed records including, as James noted, management practices etc.
Someone who decided to scam the gov by doing up a bunch of nucs and then saying they were non-viable would end up with a bunch of hives and no record of where they'd come from (because, for eg, take 10 single brood boxes with 6 frames of bees, divide into nucs -- you could claim that 10 of your hives were non-viable. But come July, you'd have a number of new hives (from what worked out of the other 10 nucs), with new queens, with no record of where they'd come from. You couldn't say you'd bought them. Possibly you could say they were swarm catches. But then it's lies all down the line, and chancy.

Last year the deadline to apply for compensation was June 20th. This year it's May 15th. So maybe that change came about because someone changed the numbers after the period. That is, having an extra month to think about, they decided to fudge the figures. Shortening the period perhaps would give people pause about doing this. 

This all comes about because the OBA has been pointing to our high winter losses last year as being due to neonics. It's push-back. As others have noted, there are a lot of possible causes for the losses -- it was a bad winter, or, the ice storm that went across a large swath of the province actually sealed hives in ice, and they suffocated. So who knows. Interestingly from my perspective, last year I dropped 36 of 45. So far this winter, it's 6 of 37. And seven of those are doubled up, so the figures may well be better still. Fingers crossed.

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