“A lot of beekeepers are planning to run less bees this year based on diminished capacity for labour,” said Mark Friesen, chair of the Manitoba Beekeepers Association.

Border closures and airline shutdowns related to COVID-19 made it difficult for international seasonal workers to arrive in Manitoba. Friesen estimated about 80 per cent of expected workers have arrived.

Beekeepers teamed up to charter planes to bring international beekeepers to Canada. Friesen said some wanted to charter another plane, but doesn’t expect that will happen.

Paul Gregory, who farms near Fisher Branch, hasn’t had any of his usual four or five Filipino beekeepers arrive. They’ve been held up in the Philippines by administrative and logistical challenges.

Gregory has hired a young chef from Montreal and some students, and said, “We’re kind of making do.”

He reduced production to between 1,300 and 1,400 bee colonies from 1,800 because of his lack of experienced staff.

“That’s kind of a hit there,” he said. “You can only manage so many new staff.”

Friesen said supply chains for new bee stock has been a bigger issue than labour.

Many beekeepers bring in queens from places like Chile, New Zealand, and Australia, said Friesen. These bees often travel on passenger airplanes, many of which were grounded as the pandemic set in.

In an ordinary year, between 40,000 and 60,000 packages of bees would come to Canada from those countries to replace winter bee losses, according to a report from the Western Producer.

Chartering a flight to bring in bees was deemed too expensive. “The best strategy becomes just to be scaling back your operation,” Friesen said.

The post Manitoba Beekeepers expect reduced production appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“I want people, when they’re sitting at the table, I want to make sure that Bee Boyzz brought them to the table,” said Kon Paseschnikoff. “When you make mead, you make people happy.”

Kon and Julie Paseschnikoff, beekeepers and owners of Bee Boyzz Honey, will soon unveil Bee Boyzz Meadery. They’ve developed saskatoon berry, strawberry-rhubarb, and pear flavours using Manitoba fruit.

“I just want to keep the honey and the fruit Manitoba,” Kon said.

While mead has been made in Manitoba before, the Paseschnikoffs are the first craft meadery to use their own honey.

The Paseschnikoff farm began in the 1960s, when Kon’s father came to Canada from Venezuela. Kon Paseschnikoff Sr. was a beekeeper in Venezuela, and continued this as a hobby in Canada. The farm’s main function was as a market garden, and after awhile the beekeeping fell by the wayside.

Shortly before he died, Kon’s father suggested that Kon get back into beekeeping. Kon balked initially, but eventually gave in. He got his bees the day after his father’s funeral.

These days, the Paseschnikoffs don’t grow veggies. They operate about 175 hives in the Pembina Valley, Assiniboine Valley, Sanford, Oak Bluff and Winnipeg.

A few years ago they were looking for ways to diversify. Bulk honey prices were bad and they had excess honey. Julie developed flavoured honey — a lengthy process of research, sourcing, tasting and blending the flavours. No sooner did she have labels on her first jars and Kon had another idea: mead.

“She almost kicked me out. I was almost living in the shop,” Kon joked.

What followed was two years of research — visiting meaderies in British Columbia, attending courses in California and researching liquor laws — and making batch after batch of experimental honey wine.

One thing they learned was that, as Prairie-dwellers, they had access to exceptional honey. At a mead-making course in the States, they met fellow beekeepers who’d brought honey to taste.

Some of what they saw was black and strong. The Paseschnikoffs’ honey was pale yellow with the flavours of canola and alfalfa. Some of the American beekeepers couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been bleached or processed.

“I will tell you, we make the nicest honey,” Kon said.

Their traditional mead is pale and golden like white wine and sweet and mild in flavour.

They also made a blueberry mead for Julie’s 50th birthday. The crimson beverage with deep blueberry notes was a resounding hit, they said.

Now, just weeks from hitting store shelves, the Paseschnikoffs are nervous and excited. This is their retirement money on the line, Kon said, adding he’s often been tempted to quit.

Preparations are ongoing for the first bottling, the Paseschnikoffs say. They’re still finishing up reams of paperwork and waiting for their labels to come.

“This has been a long, long process,” Julie said, “and it will continue to be.”

“We push each other, and I think for us all this has really brought us even closer together,” Julie said. “It’s coming together, slowly but surely.”

The post First bee-to-bottle meadery to open soon in Manitoba appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Red River College has expanded its urban beekeeping project in partnership with Beeproject Apiaries, adding three new rooftop beehives on the school’s Notre Dame Campus. But Beeproject founder Chris Kirouac said the expansion is about far more than honey production.

“The honey is really a secondary bonus from the project,” the beekeeper explained, noting pollinators need help from urban populations to stay healthy. About 80 per cent of the Canadian population now live in cities, but Kirouac said that doesn’t mean they don’t have a role to play in pollinator health.

“We need to educate the public, the purchasing power and voting power in cities is enormous,” he said. “So we’re interested in promoting Canadian food security and this is one way to engage citizens of the city. When they see or hear about beehives in the city they are much more likely to ask questions, to think about things they can do to aid with the survival of those creatures.”

The college’s manager of sustainability, Sara MacArthur, said the school’s six hives promote biodiversity and have piqued the interest of staff and students alike.

“A lot of our staff have been interested in visiting the bees and learning about the work they do,” MacArthur said. “Having the hives on our rooftops downtown and at the Notre Dame Campus encourages that kind of accessible learning about what bees do for the environment and the benefits to creating a natural product on campus.”

Honey was extracted from the hives last week, which are expected to produce about 150 kilograms of the sweet stuff. After processing, the honey will go to Red River College’s Culinary Arts program where it will be used by students or sold at the school’s second annual farmers’ market on Sept. 15.

“We hope staff and students who purchase our ‘campus-made’ honey may stop and think for a second about how amazing it is that this delicious product was made right here,” MacArthur said. “Forget the 100-mile diet, this is the 100-foot diet.”

Students and staff were also invited to vote on a name for the honey produced on the Notre Dame Campus, finally deciding on “Creekside Honey” in reference to Omand’s Creek, which traverses the edge of the campus before flowing through Brookside Cemetery.

MacArthur said the creek’s banks are home to a variety of wild plants, flowers and wildlife, and are likely a popular place for the school’s bees to collect pollen.

The post Rooftop hives educating college appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“Education is very important in those regards and I think probably one of our largest concerns is how many small-scale beekeepers on the Internet want to preach treatment-free beekeeping, which is not a recommended practice at all,” said Allan Campbell of the Manitoba Beekeepers’ Association. “We’d like to see bees’ health looked after more than anything because they are essentially a herd animal, so you need to protect that. There’s a lot of so-called ‘gurus’ on the Internet who preach to go this treatment-free route and if you don’t know what you’re looking at, you can spread disease very quickly.”

• Read more: App sounds sweet to honey producers’ group

Advocates of treatment-free beekeeping often cite concerns with pesticide residue, antibiotic levels in honey or treatment resistance in common pests such as the varroa mite.

Varroa mite and American foulbrood are of particular concern to the beekeepers’ association. The mites have gained a reputation as one of the honey industry’s most notorious pests, feeding on bee fluids, weakening bees and transferring viruses. Mite-born infections have been known to cause deformed wings.

The bacterial American foulbrood targets larvae and is “nearly impossible to kill,” according to Campbell.

“The only thing that’ll kill that bacteria is fire,” he said.

In many cases, equipment must also be burned to stem the spread.

• Read more: Bringing back flowers to the field

John Sochaski of Bee Out­fitters in Tisdale, Sask. also raised the alert on foulbrood, which he says can be prohibitively expensive for a hobbyist who suddenly needs to burn equipment.

“We’ve started this from Day 1, telling them that they have to treat for mites and different diseases,” he said.

The Saskatchewan company runs a beekeeping workshop on hive management and provides backyard beekeeping kits to major retailers.

More joining the ranks

In 2013, hive numbers in Man­itoba dropped from 80,000 to 74,000. By 2016, numbers had climbed up to a record 102,000, at least partly due to an influx of new beekeepers.

The 2016 Statistics Canada annual report on honey production said Manitoba beekeeper numbers have grown from 517 in 2012 to 662 in 2016, although the province still made up only about seven per cent of all beekeepers in Canada.

Of the 698 beekeepers registered with the province this year, 487 are hobby farms with 50 hives or less.

Beekeepers must be commercial apiarists (over 50 hives) to be full members with the Beekeepers’ Association of Manitoba, although associate memberships are available for hobbyists.

Disease information is offered both through the association’s website and through the provincial apiarist, Rhéal Lafreniere.

For many hobbyists, that education is coming from Rob Currie of the University of Manitoba. He runs a two-month non-credit course covering bee anatomy and behaviour, hive management, regulations, marketing and management of pests and parasites.

Two of the course’s eight nights are devoted to pathogens and pests, Currie said, although the topic permeates the course.

Like Campbell, Currie identifies varroa mites and American foulbrood among the most serious beekeeping threats in Manitoba and stressed the need for monitoring both before and after treatment.

“Usually when beekeepers get into big trouble, it’s because their mites got out of control,” he said. “They either weren’t monitoring or they applied acaricides and assumed that the mite levels were low and then they had a problem with resistance so they ended up losing a lot of colonies as a result.

“Without question, varroa mite is the No. 1 issue in terms of staying on top of it and making sure that you have good treatments in place and good monitoring in place.”

Resistance to chemical treatment has been noted with both mites and American foulbrood, Currie said. His course also covers fungal nosema infestations, tracheal mites and European foulbrood.

He has also fielded questions about treatment-free beekeeping from his students.

“We try and tell them that, although you can avoid using sort of the hard chemicals, that you would have to be very diligent in terms of using cultural controls and physical controls and we circle through those in class,” Currie said.

While advertised with a 60-student cap, Currie has said that class sizes have ranged between 100 and 125 over the last three years.

The jump has been in line with a similar rise in beekeeping nationwide. Statistics Canada estimates there were about 9,900 beekeepers in Canada last year, 19 per cent more than in 2012. The industry produced $157.8 million worth of honey, of which $21 million came from Manitoba.

Prescription needed

Sochaski has said he often reminds customers to educate themselves on disease when they call looking for medicines, but federal changes will likely pull those products from his shelves.

Health Canada’s Antimicrobial Use Initiative would limit some antibiotics, such as those used to prevent the spread of foulbrood, to distribution by a veterinarian.

The move is part of federal efforts to address antibiotic resistance in humans and animals. In 2015, Canada was among the countries to support the World Health Organization Global Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance, of which national action plans were a part.

Campbell, however, has expressed concern over the changes.

“Virtually every veterinarian knows nothing at all about bees, so on the one hand, yeah, they know drugs; they know antibiotics, but if they don’t know the animal, then it’s kind of disturbing,” he said.

Beekeepers in other provinces have also protested the move. In a 2016 letter to Health Canada, the Ontario Beekeepers Association warned that “any restrictive access to antibiotics, such as requiring beekeepers to obtain a prescription from veterinarians, would be counterproductive and harmful to Ontario’s already fragile honeybee health and beekeeping industry.”

The letter further recommended mandatory certification that would train new beekeepers in proper antibiotic use within five years of obtaining hives.

The post Training critical for new beekeepers to avoid disease woes appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

BeeConnected, an app piloted in Manitoba last year and about to make its full-scale national debut, looks to facilitate communication between beekeepers and pesticide users.

The app for Apple and Android allows registered beekeepers to mark present or planned hive locations. Those locations are compared to data logged by producers or contractors also using the app. If any beekeeping location comes within five kilometres of a logged property or planned spraying location, both parties are alerted. A messenger function will then allow them to communicate, without either being required to provide personal contact information. Hives are reported in blocks of up to two months at a time, although that period may be extended.

“Certainly it enhances the ability of beekeepers and farmers to communicate and spray applicators to communicate to provide another tool to avoid conflict,” said Rod Scarlett, executive director of the Canadian Honey Council.

The national council partnered last year with the app’s provider, CropLife, to offer it free of charge in Canada.

The app was originally developed by CropLife’s sister organization in Australia. CropLife later announced that the app had broken 1,000 users in that country.

Following its success Down Under, interest in the app spread internationally, including the U.S., Latin America, Asia and Brazil.

In Canada, CropLife championed the app last year and began looking for possible beta testing locations. The organization eventually reached out to the Manitoba Aerial Applicators Association, Manitoba Beekeepers Association, Manitoba Agriculture and various other industry stakeholders.

“The need arose when we asked beekeepers what their main issue was; it was really around communication and knowing when and whether growers or aerial applicators were going to be applying products, and same thing with aerial applicators and commercial growers,” CropLife Canada acting president Pierre Petelle said. “They were saying it would be good to know where those hives are, so this app filled that need of connecting those two groups together.”

CropLife took feedback on the app’s ease of use, missing parameters and general look and feel. Petelle also noted that updates are ongoing.

Allan Campbell, president of the Manitoba Beekeepers Association, was one of the local producers to participate in the pilot.

“It looked like it really fit the bill,” he said. “It looked after the mapping for us, but at the same time looked after any privacy concerns anybody might have about publicly listing where their bee yard locations are.”

The BeeConnected privacy policy precludes the rent, sale, trade or sharing of personal information to a third party with the exception of the firm which holds the app’s database. Petelle has said that firm is also bound by privacy policy preventing personal information from being shared without permission.

“We’re very clear in the agreement with the IT firm that holds the database… legal counsel has been involved since the beginning and those are strictly prohibited and we put that in the terms of agreement. It’s very clear that none of their information can or will be used for any other purpose than management of the app,” Petelle said.

Usernames, user type (i.e. farmer, beekeeper or contractor), relevant hive/field locations and registered pesticide applications will be visible to other users, but not personal contact information or legal names.

A soft launch offered the app across Western Canada following the Manitoba pilot, ending 2016 with 175 registered users. Users were split evenly between beekeepers and pesticide applicators, Petelle said.

CropLife ramped up promotional efforts in 2017, reaching out to media and provincial beekeeping organizations. As of April 2017, the app had over 400 active users.

“It is a process of trying to get information out,” Scarlett said. “It is another tool. We’re trying to hit it really at a busy season, a busy time for everybody, so we expect that there won’t be huge uptake to begin with but that people will see the benefits and hear the benefits. We are looking to those who were in the pilot project last year to make sure that they tell their neighbours and their friends and let them know the value of the program.”

Campbell said he was interested in using the app again this year, but noted that uptake will be the main challenge for an app that requires widespread use before its users can reap the full benefit. It is a challenge that both Scarlett and Petelle have also noted.

Prior to the app, Campbell said, his operations relied largely on word of mouth.

“Hopefully you have a good relationship with all your growers that you’re working with and they’ll communicate with you if there’s any urgency to spray or something and they’re worried about bees,” he said. “But, you know, sometimes they’re good enough to ask, ‘Do you have bees in the area or anybody else?’ and sometimes you may not even be aware of somebody else’s hives being in the area, so with this app, the farmer can just send out a broadcast message to everybody in the area.”

The post App sounds sweet to honey producers’ group appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Kevin Nixon, the organization’s president, told the Senate agriculture committee there’s still plenty to learn about bees and what’s causing overwintering losses and how various pesticides may affect their health. The committee is reviewing progress since it released its report on bees two years ago.

Nixon said the Pest Management Regulatory Agency and Health Canada have devoted considerable time and resources into studying these issues.

The latest overwintering loss report indicates areas which were identified as high-loss areas due to claims of pesticides seem to have their losses greatly reduced, he noted.

“Whether or not the protective measures which were brought in had much to do with the changes in mortality is a big question,” he said.

Another plus for the industry was the formation of the national Bee Health Roundtable by Agriculture Canada, he said. It “has played a vital role in bringing together the stakeholders and allowed a forum for us to work collaboratively to identify areas of priority and identify gaps where we really need to focus efforts.”

The roundtable has worked with PMRA on accelerated registration for bee health products, he pointed out.

“There is currently one new product which has been identified to be expedited in order to get it to beekeepers to be used as soon as possible,” Nixon said. “The real problem right now is there are not many potential candidates for future registrations in the near term as a mite control for beekeepers.”

Best management practices for beekeepers is another area where the roundtable has been useful.

“By bringing together the stakeholders, we’re able to better understand each other’s needs,” he said. “Through better understanding, we’re able to work collaboratively to reduce pesticide exposure to bees, as well as develop a best management practices manual for beekeepers across the country.”

The manual should be a useful tool for new and hobby beekeepers, he added. “Even for longtime commercial beekeepers, it could be used as a training tool for employees.”

The Honey Council also appreciates the growing public interest and awareness of pollinator habitat, he said. The roundtable has worked on this issue as well and there should be “some results coming very soon from that.”

The PMRA has also been working to wrap up the review of neonic pesticides that only have conditional registration, he said. He expects to see the first of the three reports this December and the following two next December.

“The CHC understands conditional registrations have a time and place where they are needed to be used,” he said. “In some cases, it seems a conditional registration was in place longer than it maybe should have.”

The roundtable is also working to complete a bee health surveillance project. The study will be an important tool for the monitoring of emerging pests and diseases, as well as current pests and diseases.

“It may also play an important role when it comes to international trade, evaluating the stock we receive from our supply countries, as well as opening doors for us to send our stock to other countries,” Nixon said. “Without the data being collected and analyzed under an established protocol by an independent lab, there is not much hope of making progress in these areas.”

Meanwhile the council has developed a bee farm level biosecurity standard as an on-farm food safety program. It was rolled out to producers over this past year.

“The uptake has not been great so far,” Nixon said. “There are a few reasons for this. At this time, beekeepers feel they are not going to get paid any more for their product whether they adopt some of these practices or not. We are currently facing an extremely depressed market where we are competing with imported honey from countries that have no standards at all, so beekeepers question why.

“Another reason is in some areas there was no access to Growing Forward 2 funding, or it had run out of funds with certain programs to help producers adopt some of these changes and offset some costs.”

The post Bee health creating a buzz appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

Chris Cutler, an associate professor in the department of environmental sciences at Dalhousie University and also a beekeeper, said another challenge is a lack of information on wild bees, which are vital to food production. There are about 1,000 bee species in Canada.

“In terms of their population dynamics and long-term community distributions and prevalence of different species, we know next to nothing about many of them,” Cutler said. “This is just another cautionary message about making blanket statements about all the bees being in decline. We actually lack a lot of data.”

He said the issue isn’t just limited to those outside the industry, but that beekeepers themselves need to better understand what’s happening.

“Education is the issue that needs to be really tackled among beekeepers,” he said. “You can have hives in the exact same location and half of them will live and half of them will die, and I won’t really be able to understand why.”

There’s a strong sense in the apiculture sector that “beekeeper extension work is key in terms of improving the health of honeybees across the country.”

Kevin Nixon, an Alberta beekeeper and chair of the Canadian Honey Council, said bee issues have received a lot of misleading media attention.

“Unfortunately, most of the media has not been willing to present all the factors affecting bee health, but is aimed at only a single factor, being pesticides,” Nixon said. “There are many factors affecting bee health.”

He cited pests and disease, habitat and nutrition, pesticides and weather and climate all as challenges.

“Most beekeepers on the whole still say that the varroa mite is still the biggest challenge that we face,” he said. “The mite and viruses can decimate a beekeeping operation quite quickly if not managed well.”

Nixon added it’s a frustrating situation for beekeepers with millions of dollars invested in their operation and no solution forthcoming from the research community.

Beekeepers also face rising costs from supplemental feeding of their bees, Nixon noted.

“All regions of Canada go through periods throughout the year when they need to feed their bees, however, it seems like we are feeding more than ever before,” he said.

The main reason for that is the lack of habitat, such as flowers and weeds, that are food sources for bees.

While some pesticides can be toxic to honeybees, there are also many pesticides, which are safe to use around bees, Nixon said.

“When products are used responsibly and the label is followed, most risk can be alleviated,” Nixon said.

Peter Kevan, a professor emeritus at the Ontario Agricultural College and internationally known bee expert, said starvation is a major factor in bee deaths during the winter.

“Starvation is a management problem,” Kevan said, adding it points to the need for better training of beekeepers.

“We really do need a systematic way of monitoring management practices so that we can make comparisons between the regions in Canada to try to understand what can be done better here or there.”

The starvation issue is due in part to the rather conservative nature of the beekeepers.

“Beekeeping equipment by and large has not changed, at least in the field, for about 150 years,” Kevan said. “I think there are some new approaches that could be taken, that need to be taken.”

Kevan also said the effects of pesticides on bees has been poorly monitored and documented. The debate over the use of neonic seed treatments has created a situation where emotions trump logic at times.

“Disagreements have sort of resulted in the situation being clouded by emotionally expressed opinions, backed up with some facts, some factoids, and some fallacies,” Kevan said. “We are not getting a very good picture of the actual problem, unfortunately, because of the way things are unfolding. Everybody has a stake in it and we understand what those stakes are and that everybody’s stake is legitimate. But there has to be some sort of balance, which seems to be somewhat lacking.”

The post Bee die-offs from multiple causes appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

BeeConnected was developed by CropLife Australia and the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council, to allow farmers, beekeepers, and pesticide applicators to collaborate, anonymously, to facilitate best practices to protect pollinators. The app is now available here for iPhone and Android devices, as well as through a web platform, at no cost.

“We have heard from a number of farmers and farm groups, aerial applicators, beekeepers, and provincial governments across Canada that better communication between all parties would be helpful and could go a long way to keep Canada’s honeybees healthy,” said CropLife Canada vice-president, chemistry, Pierre Petelle in an email announcing the app’s arrival in Canada.

Bees and pesticides are integral and complementary components of sustainable agriculture, he said. Bees pollinate many important crops while pesticides protect those crops from pest damage and help protect against disease in hives.

Recently CropLife has been hearing from farmers, farm groups, aerial applicators, beekeepers and provincial governments across Canada that better communication would be helpful for all of them and would have a profound impact on keeping honeybees healthy, Petelle added.

“The plant science industry is committed to ensuring that both bees and agriculture can coexist and thrive,” he wrote.

Users download the free app, and register as a beekeeper, farmer or pesticide applicator. The application allows users to indicate planned agricultural activities or to specify beehive locations. All registered information is only shared with relevant users in their area. The application enables instant messaging between registered users, while maintaining their privacy, to improve overall communication and allow the exchange of important information.

The app helps farmers and beekeepers in the same area notify one another of planned activities while still maintaining privacy.

The application allows farmers to tell beekeepers in their area when they plan to use crop protection products, including pesticide applications and the planting of treated seed. Beekeepers who have registered their hives will receive a notification if they are within five kilometres of the planned activity.

Users enter basic information including their name, username and an email address and only the username appears to other users.

Users then enter locations important to their operations. Beekeepers enter the location of the bee yards. Farmers and contractors enter field sites and then record activities such as planting, and pest control applications relevant to beekeepers.

BeeConnected has a built-in messaging service so that users can co-ordinate or privately share information with other registered users within five kilometres. Users are also able to broadcast messages that allow them to simultaneously contact all relevant registered users within five kilometres of their activity or hive locations.

Farmers and spray contractors can search the map on the app for the locations of nearby bee yards and beekeepers can explore an area to see farmer or crop protection activity.

Beekeepers cannot see the location of other beekeepers’ hives and farmers and pesticide applicators cannot see the activities of other farmers and applicators.

For more information about the app, visit beeconnected.ca.

The post App promises better communication between farmers and beekeepers appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“It’s usually the humidity and the higher temperatures that make the bees and the hives feel hot, the same way that we do,” said Waldemar Damert, president of the Red River Apiarists. “We don’t like to be hot and humid and they don’t like that either.”

Those overheated bees cool off by hanging around outside the hives where they begin to build new cells. Before long new, young queens are being raised in those cells and the hive needs to split in two.

“It’s then the old queen flies out with the majority of the bees,” Waldemar explained. “They first swarm out and they hang around in the trees. Then they basically have bees that go and scout for places that they can move into, usually it’s a building that has a crack on the side, or a hole where they can fit in, or a small shed, or whatever they can find. So they will move into there if the beekeeper doesn’t see them in time and collect them.”

Smaller beekeepers are often able to see swarms and rehive the bees. But honey producers with larger operations and bee yards parsed out over a wide geographic area might not be able to react fast enough to recapture bees on the move.

“With several thousand hives, well if they are around in that particular yard at that particular moment they would collect the swarm, but the majority of the swarm will actually swarm out to somewhere else,” said the apiarist. “Then they are gone.”

Even if bees are captured before moving on to greener pastures, having two small colonies instead of a single strong colony will still result in much more work for the beekeeper, Damert notes, adding those colonies will also produce less honey.

“But that’s basic reproduction with honeybees, they are not out there to make a big hive, their natural reproduction method is swarming as much as they can to leave as many hives as possible around for survival,” he said.

And while the word “swarm” doesn’t always have a positive connotation, the beekeeper was quick to point out that swarming honeybees pose no risk to the public.

“They ignore you completely, even if they see you they will just fly by you completely,” he said. “They will move on and keep going to where they are moving to.”

And while cities like Winnipeg don’t currently allow urban beekeeping, Damert said that some of these swarms would have ended up in urban locations anyways. But many people have trouble telling the difference between honeybees and wasps, he added, indicating that while wasp populations have been high this year, it’s possible some people have mistaken wasps for honeybees and vice versa.

The high prevalence of swarming this summer is expected to have an impact on overall honey production in Manitoba, but it’s still too early to know exactly what that impact will be.

“Honey production overall is down, we’re probably looking at about 20 to 30 per cent less,” Damert. said. “But I would suspect that also had something to do with weather patterns.”

The post Bee swarms cut into honey production appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.

“I would expect good overwintering success,” said Allan Campbell, president of the Manitoba Beekeepers’ Association, adding that winter is a key factor for Prairie apiarists.

“The winter conditions, I expect that to make a huge difference this year, winter is probably one of the biggest threats in Manitoba,” he said.

Industry officials say it’s too early to gauge overwintering losses, but the fact that it was a shorter winter raises optimism. Long winters are considered more damaging than exceptionally cold ones, but when the two are combined, it can decimate colonies. Overwintering losses after the winter of 2014 were an average of 46 per cent.

Waldemar Damert said however, that it’s not only weather that impacts a bee colony’s ability to survive.

“A mild winter definitely helps, but it’s not everything… our bees are actually dying because of a few factors,” said the president of the Red River Apiarists’ Association. “Agriculture these days uses a lot of pesticides and so that’s another big impact right there.”

The commercial beekeeper also believes that high winter mortality may be linked in part to a surge of new honey producers who might not have the experience they need to keep colonies healthy.

“Since 2006, we’ve had a fairly big influx of newer beekeepers who don’t have experience, and experience is very important with this — in this climate specifically,” Damert said. “So many people go into beekeeping with the idea that this is a wild animal and will take care of itself, all I need to do is just extract the honey. That’s not the case.”

Campbell noted he’s only heard from a couple of beekeepers regarding winter losses this spring, but he added the apiarist with the highest losses he’s heard of so far is also new to the industry.

“I’m not really sure what’s behind that, other than the guy who lost 50 per cent is a new beekeeper,” he said. “So that could be just due to experience.”

As for his own 4,000 hives, Campbell said they spent the winter in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.

“So I can tell you I had a great winter,” he said, adding his bees are now heading to the blueberries of the Fraser Valley, before returning to Manitoba for the summer months.

The post Shorter winter favours honeybees appeared first on Manitoba Co-operator.