Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and for your hospitality the last time I visited. It was a great pleasure to be able to talk to you, and it is an honour to be able to address this committee formally.
I will just give you a little bit about my background. Very often people think of pointy-headed professors as not being very practical. I was one of the founding members of the Pikes Peak Beekeepers Association in Colorado, and I still am a member of that association and I taught beekeeping to many people there.
I am presently the president of the International Commission for Plant-Pollinator Relationships, which has a special working group on bee health that will have its next meetings in Seville, Spain, in 2017. It answers to the European and Mediterranean Plant Protection Organization and provides advice to them on bee protection and bee monitoring and pollinator monitoring, particularly in Europe.
I was also the scientific director of the Canadian pollination initiative, an NSERC strategic network that brought in $5 million over five years. That lasted from 2009 until about 2016. More recently I've been on the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Its major report will be forthcoming very soon from the program on pollination and pollinators.
I have a very broad spectrum of interests in pollination and also in beekeeping. I taught the introductory apiculture course at the University of Guelph for about 25 years.
There are various aspects of beekeeping that need monitoring, and I have restricted my remarks and the material that I sent to the clerk to what is needed in monitoring. As we have heard from the other witnesses, we need to keep healthy bees.
We have heard that in Canada we do not seem to have the international problems that are really creating a stir in a lot of the press. We hear this from international agencies, as well, that North American beekeeping is in decline. We have heard—and this is correct—that beekeeping in Canada is quite healthy and overwintering losses in the last year.... Before I came today I spoke to Rod Scarlett, from the Canadian Honey Council, about losses across the country. He indicates that in fact they are well down in Quebec and in Ontario, although they were very high in Ontario, particularly last year. They are a little higher in Alberta than would be desirable, but nonetheless they are manageable. This is important.
Certainly the issues with monitoring honeybee diseases and pests are important, and the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists and the provincial apiarists across the country do a bang-up job of that. That is very well handled. As we have heard there is probably the need for greater harmonization across the provinces so that we can make better comparisons to understand in more depth the differences that may be regionally affecting our nation.
The problem of pesticides to beekeeping has been poorly monitored and documented. The issues with neonicotinoids certainly have caused major disagreements and the ground table has been one of the places where those disagreements have resulted in the situation being clouded by emotionally expressed opinions, backed up with some facts, some factoids, and some fallacies. We are not getting a very good picture of the actual problem, unfortunately, because of the way things are unfolding. Everybody has a stake in it and we understand what those stakes are and that everybody's stake is legitimate, but there has to be some sort of balance, which seems to be somewhat lacking. Maybe we're approaching some balance there. I haven't served with that round table for some time.
Certainly the issues of intensive agriculture that we've heard about are important and they include agrochemical uses, not just insecticides but also herbicide use and also the issues with genetically modified crops.
In terms of the problem associated with the herbicide-tolerant crops, such as Roundup Ready, that's fine, but it cleans the fields out because the weeds don't come in, and we heard about the importance of weeds to bees and beekeeping. Very clean fields are not a very healthy place for bees, except during the period in which the crop is in bloom. When there is no bloom, there's nothing for bees, wild bees or honeybees, so this is a bit of a problem.
One of the things we do hear about, and this came up in the statistics from the Canadian Honey Council and from the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists as to the three reasons for overwintering losses. A major one was starvation. Starvation is a management problem. Again, it was brought up that, yes, we probably need to look into some of the management issues. That was brought up particularly with the remarks about increased need for extension. We're seeing that happen in the Maritimes now with their tech transfer team being established. We can expect that to happen and some greater harmonization, particularly through the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists.
We really do need a systematic way of monitoring management practices, again, so we can make comparisons between the regions in Canada to try to understand what can be done better here or there. I have said this to people like David Hackenberg in the United States and to American colleagues, “Why don't you people look north where we're not having the problems?” They might say, “Well, I don't know the answer to that.” It's as if I'm from a different planet when I say that.
The Mexicans are not having problems with their beekeeping either, but they're dealing with Africanized bees, the so-called killer bees. That's a different quintal of fish, to use a Newfoundland expression.
Certainly, part of the starvation issue is diet. As was pointed out by one of the other witnesses, we're having to feed our bees more and more with either a pollen substitute, pollen supplements, and a lot of sugar as syrup, in order to keep our bees through the winter and to give them the strength, particularly in the latter part of the winter when the bees are building up their populations at a time when there's still snow on the ground and there's nothing for them to eat. They have to be fed at that time of year, or the feed has to go on in the fall in preparation for a long winter.
I have found in my experience—and I'm sure I will be unpopular for saying this—that the beekeeping industry is rather conservative and is rather dismissive. Beekeeping equipment by and large has not changed, at least in the field, for about 150 years. We're still using equipment that was designed by Lorenzo Langstroth about 150 years ago and has been adapted a little bit. I think there are some new approaches that could be taken, that need to be taken.
The other issue I have found, because of my international involvement in pollination and bees, is that over the last decade-plus Canada has been disconnected from the international community to a large extent, except through the academics and to a lesser extent through the provincial apiarists and the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists. I really think it's important for Canadian beekeeping to become more cognizant of the big program called COLOSS in Europe, based in Switzerland. Perhaps the Liberal campaign platform and the Senate reports from 2013 and 2015 will be able to take us in that direction.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.