That's a good question. For the last three years we've faced pretty big losses, as everyone is aware. We applied for ag-recovery funds. We petitioned or lobbied for more research facilities, more researchers, more educators, and nothing was coming our way.
So we joined with the Alberta government, the Alberta Beekeepers Association, the hybrid seed canola companies, and we formed a hive health program. We went around with the technicians and we trained and educated beekeepers in how to get their hives healthy again, how to expand. The big are getting bigger; the small ones are disappearing because they don't want to put that time and effort in. Farming is no longer farming; farming is a business, and that's how they have to treat it.
We took it upon ourselves to help ourselves because there was no help coming down the pipeline. If we had waited for the federal government or the provincial government to do it on their own, we would have died--we absolutely would have died--so we had to do it all on our own.
Now that they've seen that--and I think it's a big thing when we can show government we can take the initiative and do something to better our industry, improve it and grow it--I think that goes a long way for the government to jump on board and help us out.
With respect to your question of how the government can help us expand the industry or grow it, we basically did it in Alberta with the hive health program, and other provinces are looking at doing that too. That's something that if the government wanted to jump on board and really assist us with that, it would be great.
One more comment is that we had a course at Fairview College for agriculturalists, for beekeeper technicians. That died. That's going to be started again in January 2011. So we're also taking an active role in education for the industry. But again, it was industry that had to lead that.