Death in the Beehive

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Do you know what a swarm of 60 million bees looks like? Paul Benoit does.

By the middle of summer he’d be a happy man if there were that many bees flying around his large area of farmland, located just a few kilometres east of Girouxville in the francophone heart of northern Alberta’s Peace Country; further down Highway 49 is Falher, home to Alberta’s largest bee statue.

Just 100 metres from his home can exist hundreds of thousands of bees, if not into the millions. For some, that might be an unnerving scenario, even terrifying. Yet to Benoit, the buzz of the insects is a sweet sound in more ways than one. To him, it’s the sound of money, the sound of his livelihood.

Benoit is one of hundreds of beekeepers in Alberta, a honey farmer essentially. Sitting scattered around his property are as many as 1,500 wood-sided bee hives. At peak season, each hive can contain as many as 40,000 honeybees – 60 million in total. Benoit, who owns and operates Benoit Apiaries with his 18-year-old daughter, Jenna Bigstone, and two employees, has been a beekeeper for 30 years.

“At first it was just a job, but I grew to love it,” says Benoit.

“Without bees, humans can’t live,” adds Bigstone, who is already well trained in this niche of agriculture and may take over her father’s operation one day. Both of them are part of an industry that produces half of Canada’s honey and one that plays a large part in the pollination of agriculture crops across Alberta.

But in the last two years, life hasn’t been very sweet for Benoit or Alberta’s honeybee industry. At the end of this past winter when Benoit examined his hives to see how they survived the winter, he discovered half of his bees were dead. Bees, like any insect, are susceptible to disease and infestation. For decades, a common parasite that sucks the fluid out of bees called a varroa mite has plagued beekeepers. It was kept under control with existing chemical treatments called miticides, at least until the varroa mites started becoming immune. It’s not the dreaded colony collapse disorder that’s devastated bee farms in the United States. Nevertheless, it’s wreaked havoc on Alberta beekeepers.

The honeybee industry, considered a niche industry, is valued in the tens of millions of dollars in Alberta. According to an Alberta government study, so far this decade it grossed a high of $57.5 million in 2003 and a low of $24.3 million in 2006 (2008 figures are not yet available). Beekeepers in a normal year will experience a winter loss rate of 10% to 15% of their stock; the insects simply don’t survive the winter cold, especially in the northern half of the province where the farms are concentrated. But since the varroa mites started becoming immune to existing treatments, winter loss rates have soared close to 50%, sometimes more.

That’s what’s happened to Paul Benoit. At the start of the spring when he began inspecting his hives, he would open them and find the bottoms littered with dead bees, most of them covered in parasitic mites. He will have to spend much of this summer trying to rebuild these hives, growing queen bees and trying to nurture fresh hives. It will mean a smaller honey crop for the second year in a row. It was the same story last year; 2008 was the first time since the 1990s Benoit had to claim his crop insurance, he says.

“It’s a lot of work to rebuild your hives. We just have to try again, build up the hives and try again…. This year our numbers are down. We’re concentrating on rebuilding, not on producing so much.”

Terry Greidanus is the president of the Alberta Beekeepers Association and owner and operator of Mountainview Honey, based in High River. With more than 2,500 hives in his apiary, Greidanus earns most of his income not from honey sales, but from what the bees do before making honey, a role some would say is even more important: pollination. As with many southern Alberta beekeepers, honey production is more of a side benefit as Greidanus is contracted by agricultural multinationals such as Monsanto to stock their fields with his hives to pollinate hybrid canola and other crops.

A dearth of bees for pollination can have huge impacts for agriculture. The hybrid canola sector alone is valued at approximately $350 million, according to provincial officials. “We’re in a recovery mode now,” Greidanus says of his industry, going so far as to say that the summer of 2009 could be a make-it-or-break-it season for many beekeepers in Alberta who have been decimated by varroa mites to the point where recovery isn’t economically viable.

Alberta supplies roughly 50% of Canada’s honey crop and of that, the largest amount of honey production is done in the Peace Country, an area stretching across northwestern Alberta from Grande Prairie in the south to Peace River, 200 kilometres north. Much of the honey production is done in the north because of the area’s large fields of clover, which some believe is the best crop to pollinate for honey.

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