Thank you, committee, for inviting us to your meeting today and giving us an opportunity to share the story of beekeeping in western Canada. That's how I'll approach it.
In our particular operation, we are based in the Peace River district, which is not a great place for a honeybee to spend the winter. We move to the Okanagan Valley for the winter. I've been down there more or less continuously for the last three months. We're just making the move back to Peace River this week. I left my boys to do the work and I came to Ottawa. Having said that, I don't have a whole lot of resources with me, so I'll just be telling the story.
Part of the issue as it pertains to pesticides in western Canada is that we have not seen huge losses that can be attributed to pesticides. Losses aren't even cyclical. They seem to more or less follow the period of time that a miticide is effective. We have varroa mites in our colonies, and as long as the miticide of the day is working, our winter losses are acceptable. Typically, the way we find out that the miticides are no longer working is with massive winter losses.
In terms of the pesticide being a killer of bees in western Canada, that probably would be inappropriate to say. The sublethal effects and that sort of thing have yet to be determined, but as we move forward now, we're pretty happy with the use of neonics as a seed treatment on canola.
The other issue that seems to rack our industry is lack of training. It seems that where we have new producers or young producers, they have trouble getting their bees through the winner.
The other major factor that I would bring to you is nutrition. The natural range of honeybees is southern California, southern Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and probably in that line across to south Carolina. We're considerably out of the natural range of these insects. The wintering is a continuous battle, and getting proper nutrition I find is critical. We don't have a lot of data out there that deals with amino acid, the vitamin regimes, and these minor nutrient levels that may or may not be useful in the survival of bees. I personally have played around with it, but I'm not a scientist. I find that a vitamin package and an amino acid package tend to be useful in offsetting winter losses. There's just a world of work that needs to be done around bee nutrition.
Thank you for your time.