Well, because he goes to the sunny Okanagan Valley, I'll try....
It's had a huge impact, and there are still numbers to come in.
In Alberta we were in a very similar situation. I started my bees on March 13. It usually takes me 10 days to get around the over 7,000 colonies I run, and it took us over four weeks to get around because of the weather, the snow, and digging out bees to get protein supplements onto them. That stimulates the queen to start laying eggs. From March 13, when we started, we were seeing an average of about a 10% loss, which I was happy with—good news. Six weeks later we started our second round and we're at over a 30% loss now.
That four to six weeks is absolutely critical. I've been keeping bees for 17 years and I've never seen a spring dwindle like this. Bees are designed to live for six weeks, so we are asking the ones that hatch out in October or November to live for six months. To live anything past that is really pushing it, and for the queen to start laying eggs again, we have to get that protein to her. Usually when bees are coming out of winter and queens start laying eggs, you get a little bit of an overlap that carries them through, because it takes 21 days for eggs to hatch to get that process going again. But when those old bees are dying off and the queen hasn't started laying, you have that gap.
That's what I'm finding in my personal experience right now in Alberta. I was wondering what I had done, but I started calling around, and the story is very common from central through northern Alberta. I've heard from only a couple of beekeepers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and they have similar scenarios so far.