honeybees – BIG

Beekeepers are buzzing with the news that the first honeybee vaccine has been granted conditional approval by the United States Department of Agriculture. The vaccine was created by biotech company Dalan Animal Health, and it protects honeybees against American Foulbrood, a bacterial disease with lethal consequences for bee colonies.

American Fouldbrood affects the larval stage of honeybees and can rapidly spread through a hive. As reported by the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs website, the disease is fatal, and causes larvae to decompose into a gooey mess. It’s not a pleasant fate for a hive.

Confirming the presence of American Fouldbrood comes down to a very simple test. “The old methods still hold,” says Collette Mesher, the research lead for the Ontario Beekeepers’ Association. Once a beekeeper spots symptoms of the disease, they use what’s called a ropey test, she says. The keeper uses a stick to mush up the larvae, puts the stick in, pulls it out, and if the goop ropes or stretches more than two centimetres, the disease is confirmed.

Under the Bees Act of Ontario, American Fouldbrood must be reported once detected. It is a very virulent disease and can survive for up to 30 years on beekeeping equipment, say Ian Grant, director of the Ontario Beekeepers’ Association.

“Once it’s confirmed, the only solution is to quarantine the site and then bottle up the hive and burn everything—the bees and the equipment—and then your location is quarantined for two years,” he says. “If we don’t control it, it could possibly affect all of Ontario.”

Currently beekeepers in Ontario can ward against American Fouldbrood infection through the use of oxytetracycline, a common veterinary antibiotic. The drug is regulated by the World Health Organization and requires a veterinarian prescription. Beekeepers do have the special privilege to use the prescribed antibiotic in the spring and early fall to suppress infection, says Mesher, but this is a preventative measure, not a treatment. She adds that the World Health Organization wants to slow down or stop the preventative use of antibiotics to avoid antibiotic resistance developing.

“New research like this is exciting for us,” says Mesher. It might not replace current procedures, but it could be another tool. The fact that people are out there looking for alternatives is positive, she says.

The vaccine isn’t administered through a needle like your flu shot. Instead, the vaccine is fed to the hive’s queen bee, who will then pass on the immunity to their offspring. While Ontario doesn’t allow the import of honeybee colonies from the United States under the Bees Act, the province does allow the importation of queen bees under very strict conditions. California is a major player in queen bee breeding, so Grant says the vaccine tests in that state will be very interesting to watch.

Questions also remain about how the vaccine would fit into a beekeeper’s operation schedule. Grant says administering the vaccine requires a beekeeper to isolate their queen bee for eight days from the hive. That’s a significant amount of time where the queen is out of production, he adds.

The vaccine is still under conditional approval and has not been fully tested. For now, Ontario beekeepers are watching and waiting to see the results of the roll out in the United States. “It’s several season away before we would see it here in Canada,” says Mesher.

In the meantime, both Mesher and Grant have suggestions on how to support Ontario’s beekeepers. “We’re a significant part of the agri-food sector, but we’re well hidden,” says Grant. One third of your food supply is pollinated by honeybees, as good a reason as any to want healthy bees.

For folks who want a hands-on experience with honeybees, Ontario has 33 local beekeepers’ associations that welcome newcomers. Property owners can also partner with commercial and hobby beekeepers to host hives on their land, says Mesher.

And the most delicious option to support local honeybees and their keepers? Buy local honey.

A voice from the wilderness

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Have you noticed fewer bees buzzing around this spring? Bee populations are still declining, which is endangering our food supply and pushing Canadian farmers to rent hives to keep their crops alive.

What’s to blame? Mites, viruses, unpredictable weather, herbicides, and pesticides.

“Bees just have too many problems to deal with at one time,” says Paul Kelly, the research and apiary manager at the Honey Bee Research Centre at the University of Guelph. Before 2007, he says, “we’d lose, on average, 10 to 15 per cent of our colonies over the winter.” Now, in Ontario, bees face colony loss of about 35 per cent each winter. “The pattern is pretty similar throughout North America,” he says.

Five years ago, Kelly says, bees lost 58 per cent of their colonies to the winter, and this year, the numbers are getting close. “Climate change isn’t good for anything in nature.”

Bees can tolerate fairly warm weather, “but what doesn’t work well for them is unseasonable weather,” says Kelly. Bees cannot thrive in unseasonably hot or cold weather, or conditions that are too wet or dry.

Shorter winters, like winter 2020/2021, are both good and bad for the bees, Kelly adds. While shorter winters mean smaller colony loss (the late spring and autumn bees can survive through the winter), the longer spring and summer means a long season alongside the Varroa destructor mite.

These mites, originally from Asia, enter hives and reproduce where bee pupae grow. The young mites then feed on the pupae, and later, feed on adult bees’ blood and protein, introducing viruses into their bloodstreams.

North American bees did not co-evolve with the Varroa destructor, Kelly says. “They have no natural resistance to it.” This invasive species has been a threat to North American bees since 1990.

Agriculture Canada reported that there were 11,785 beekeepers across the country in 2020. Together, those beekeepers tend to nearly 750,000 honeybee colonies. The British Columbia agriculture ministry estimates that honeybees contribute more than $3.2 billion to the Canadian economy. The bees may be small, but their impact is colossal.

Because of tough conditions, Canadian farmers have resorted to renting hives from local beekeepers to pollinate their food crops this year. Luckily, “we’re able to manage and move [honeybees] around,” Kelly says. A honeybee hive can be home to up to 60,000 bees.

So what can homeowners and cottagers do to help? Grow some flowers and make a bee-friendly garden! “Honeybees tend to go where flowers are massed together,” Kelly says. “It’s more efficient for them.” When honeybees are foraging, he says, they only forage on one species of flower at a time. Native, non-honeybees, will go to individual flowers, “and they don’t go very far from home either.”

It’s good to have a variety of different flowers. This is called successive blooming, when a garden has flowers blooming throughout the season.

Kelly recommends swapping pollen-poor sunflowers for pollen-rich plants like colourful and fragrant lavender or late-blooming goldenrod. Trees and shrubs are great pollen sources too. Try linden and maple trees.

“In my own garden, I have squash bees pollinating my squash plants…I have bumblebees pollinating my tomatoes and peppers,” Kelly says. “They all have their specialties.”

The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) promotes native gardening too, encouraging those with outdoor spaces to include pollinators planting local flowering plants and grasses on small (or large) parts of their lawns. “Every act we do can have a knock-on effect,” says Jensen Edwards, from the NCC.

You can also support honeybees and the pollination that they provide by purchasing honey from a local beekeeper, Kelly says. “It’s not easy to make a living beekeeping.”