On Thu, Apr 26, 2012 at 1:45 PM, allen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> There was never a legitimate reason not to open the border province by
> province, according to provincial needs. Each province has different
> liquor and other restrictions at the US border, and Alberta bees and
> equipment are embargoed by Saskatchewan, indicating that inter-provincial
> and international trade are separate matters.......
>
and
>
> There are breeding programmes, though, and the Saskatraz project has
> gained some respect. They may winter better or resist mites and disease
> better, but there is no real way of knowing.
>
This is from a recent personal correspondence with a Saskatchewan beekeeper
(we were discussing the interprovincial barrier to bees on PEI because of
tracheal mites):
"When the Canadian border was closed to American bees, Saskatchewan
beekeepers had a heated debate and eventually decided by a relatively slim
majority to close the Saskatchewan border to bees from the rest of Canada.
The provincial government followed the will of the beekeepers. A couple of
years ago, the question was raised whether to open the border from other
provinces since most of the main diseases were already here and people were
having higher winter losses. They conducted a vote again and this time 69%
voted to keep the border closed. (It wasn’t even close.) The February
issue of “Hivelights” reported some interesting data about bee numbers,
losses, and queen imports. Saskatchewan has the 2nd most numbers of bee
colonies in Canada after Alberta, but in the pie graph indicating the
percentage of off-shore queens that each province imports, we didn’t even
merit a section of the graph. Saskatchewan also consistently produces
more per hive than either Alberta or Manitoba. I would argue that those
numbers are related."
and this is another letter from that beekeeper which I think is very
pertinent to this topic (it was advocating for continued border closure):
Two things stick out in my mind about beekeeping in the 1970’s. I remember
my family shaking the package bees into hives in the spring and I remember
my father carrying hives into our basement to try wintering them. I was
too young to remember much more than that. I have been told that the
reason they were trying to winter bees was that the writing was on the
wall, even then, that the border would be closed to package bees from the
United States because of pests. They continued experimenting with
wintering. They tell me that they expected to loose 30 % of the American
stock every winter just because it was not suited to our climate. That was
before the I am a 5th generation beekeeper from Saskatchewan. I’ve been on
a honey farm my whole life. advent of varroa mites and tracheal mites or
the anti-biotic resistant foulbrood. As they continued to experiment,
their success rate rose. It made logical sense that if you bred or
propagated the bees that survived the winter and produced better crops,
their progeny would be better suited to produce and survive the winter as
well. When the border was closed, it caused little more than a blip on our
farm. We were successfully wintering most of our bees by then anyways.
The few supplemental packages that we would have ordered that year did not
matter.
It has been approximately 20 years that I have been working with the bees.
In that time, our hives went from needing feed as soon as we could reach
them in the spring to now having too much so that I have a problem getting
them to use it up. The hives have gone from being fairly small clusters in
the spring to often needing an extra box to accommodate their size before I
even want to unwrap them from the winter. Our honey production per hive
has increased as we bred from the high producing colonies and our incidence
of chalkbrood declined as we bred from those hives that did not have it.
Our bees became gentler so that I can wear my veil less. (Any hive that
has been nastier than other hives has had the queen pinched and replaced.)
However, in that time our bees have also gotten both tracheal mites and
varroa mites which have significantly increased our challenges as
beekeepers. We brought in both eggs and semen from Russian stock so that
we could take advantage of the trait of varroa resistance without bringing
in anymore known or unknown pests with actual live bees.
To be a successful Canadian honey producer, we recognized early on that it
was necessary to produce our own queens to increase our production. Our
queens are not usually ready until late June or early July so we make hives
by skimming brood from our existing hives, starting new strong hives with
several combs of brood and putting a new queen in. Whenever you make
queens, you end with a few left over and so we continue to sell them. Bees
naturally reproduce and so we also sold bees when we had more bees than we
could properly look after. The last bees that we sold were in 2009. What
has surprised me in the selling of queens is that some beekeepers still
seem to think that they are running package bee operations. They expect
the queens in May like when they used to get packages. (Queens mated in
May in Canada will not be well mated and will probably not survive the
winter.) They split their hives, buy a queen to put in the new half and
run them like package hives were ran. That was the Best Management
Practice (BMP) of the 1970’s. It is clear in the research and in the bee
journals that propagating your own stock is now considered a BMP.
While this sounds quite rosy we have had some severe challenges. We began
wintering single storey hives outside when a fire took out most of our
storage one year. To this day some beekeepers tell us that you cannot
winter single storey hives outside. We began wintering small hives on
miniature combs to make it easier to start mating nucs each year for our
queens. Those hives have carried us the last two years. Finally, the last
two winters we have lost 60 % of our hives over winter both years. We are
still trying to pin down the exact causes, though weather seemed to be a
huge contributing factor the first winter. Instead of pointing to outside
causes we are re-evaluating some of the things that we did that may have
led to those losses. We will learn from our mistakes. We always have
before. The first year we were able to both produce a decent honey crop,
continue to sell queens and double our hives numbers from what had come out
of the winter. This year, we have continued to sell queens, but I do not
know what the honey crop or hive numbers will turn out to be though it does
not look good. These recent challenges have prompted us to try something
different this year. We will try wintering about 16 nucs to see if we can
bring more hives through the winter stronger. If it doesn’t work, we will
not have lost much. Either way, we will continue to breed from the
surviving colonies eventually ending up with a better bee.
You may wonder why I am telling you this. It has come to my attention that
the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is considering reopening the border to
American packages. I am asking you not to re-open the border. Yes, I have
had a couple of bad winters, but I have not brought in any extra bees from
anywhere including any of my fellow beekeepers in Saskatchewan. I have
been offered bees because there are extras out there, but I have chosen not
to buy them. Beekeepers around the world are facing challenges keeping
their bees alive. Markets like the United States (US) are having problems
filling their own demand for bees. No one has found a silver bullet, but
it has become clear that there are more pests and pathogens to bees than we
have been aware of or even are aware of now. The US has had particular
challenges with what they call Colony Collapse Disorder. They have yet to
find its cause. I choose not to buy other bees because I do not want to
unwittingly bring another known or unknown pest, parasite or pathogen to
challenge my bees. I choose not to buy foreign queens because unless they
have a particular special trait that I wish to incorporate (which I can
bring in through eggs or semen), I do not want to have bees unsuited to the
climate trying to face our winters nor do I want to bring in another pest
like small hive beetle with the live queens.
Ever since the border closed there has been a vocal group of beekeepers
that has worked tirelessly to reopen the border. Given the recent
challenges and deaths, they have seen a particular opportunity to achieve
their goal. The rest of us beekeepers have learned to winter our bees and
breed our own stock or work with our neighbours to breed stock. In the
face of hardship and challenges we have learned to innovate and adapt. We
have grouped together as beekeepers to form research funds and to work with
researchers to come up with better stock and BMP’s. Those beekeepers are
the silent majority. In 2010, Saskatchewan commercial beekeepers were
given a plebiscite to find out whether they were in favour of opening the
Saskatchewan border in some way to bees from other provinces. Sixty-nine
percent voted to keep the border closed to the other provinces.[1] <#_edn1>
Saskatchewan is an important part of the beekeeping industry in Canada. In
1999, Saskatchewan produced approximately the same amount of honey as
Alberta with only half the hives.[2] <#_edn2>
While bees do move naturally they do not move as fast naturally as they do
in trucks or planes. Likewise, bee pests, parasites and pathogens do not
move as fast naturally. Keeping the border closed enables Canadian
beekeepers to have a competitive advantage. While research is done to
identify pests, parasites and pathogens that are clearly affecting the US
and other parts of the world we can continue producing honey while watching
and learning as we wait for those problems to reach us naturally rather
than bringing them on trucks. Meanwhile, we can continue researching our
own problems and finding better BMP’s. I am asking you to protect my bees
and I from Colony Collapse Disorder, from small hive beetle and from
Africanized bees as well as any unknown problem. If you are going to
consider changing border restrictions please think about closing the border
to bees from Australia, Hawaii and New Zealand as well as the continental
US. Package bees were the BMP of the 1940’s to 1970’s, but they are no
longer a BMP. Do not put the future of the Canadian beekeeping industry
into the hands of those who have already demonstrated an inability to adapt
and innovate.
To quote Randy Oliver, a well known beekeeping columnist in the *American
Bee Journal*, in the advice that he gave to new beekeepers,
“The best way to learn beekeeping is to work with an experienced mentor who
has successfully kept bees in your area for many years. I’d look for
someone who is candid about the mistakes they’ve made, and the number of
times that they’ve recovered from major crashes. Such beekeepers are
generally not the noisiest self promoters, but here’s a tip: Any beekeeper
worth his salt will have bees for sale every spring.”[3] <#_edn3>
Yours respectfully,
Karen Pedersen
Cut Knife, Saskatchewan
------------------------------
[1] <#_ednref1> Parsons, Calvin. “President’s Report” in *Saskachewan
Beekeepers Association Newsletter*. Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring 2010, p. 4.
[2] <#_ednref2>
http://www.honeycouncil.ca/documents/honeymaple%20production%202000.pdf
[3] <#_ednref3> Oliver, Randy. “The ‘Rules’ for Successful Beekeeping”
in *American
Bee Journal*. Vol. 151, No. 7, July 2011, p. 655.
end of quote
While I think that Allen's views are valid and certainly represent the
majority view of Alberta beekeepers, I do not think it is fair to say that
the border has remained closed mainly because of advantages to the people
who are regulating and in government. The majority of beekeepers in the
country want the border with the US to stay closed (every other province I
think).
Stan
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