Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of this committee for the invitation. It's a pleasure and an honour.
Dr. Kevan and I spoke previously two years ago now to the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry on the importance of bees and bee health in the production of honey and food in Canada. It's good to see that this is still of interest and this work is ongoing.
I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for from me, so I'll try to hit on a number of different things. I probably won't take the whole 10 minutes.
Just as some personal background, I'm an associate professor at Dalhousie University. As you've heard, I'm at the faculty of agriculture, which is in Truro, which is about an hour north of Halifax. My speciality and background is in entomology, which means I work with insects. I do a lot of different things with insects including basic ecology and biological control and behaviour, and I do a lot of work with bees as well. I have a particular interest in insect ecotoxicology, which essentially looks at the effects of poisons on insects, mainly in an agricultural setting, and that mainly concerns pesticides. This includes studies into the hazards and risks certain pesticides pose to pollinators, including some of the ones I'm sure you've heard of like the widely used and debated neonicotinoid insecticides.
I can start off with a couple of comments about the importance of bees in general. I'm sure the other people who will be speaking will talk to you about that as well. Most angiosperms or flowering plants that are on the planet require pollination by pollinators and most of those pollinators are bees. About three-quarters of the food crops that we depend on require bees as well. One-quarter of the crops that we consume come from bees in terms of our dietary needs. A lot of crops that are grown do require bees, but it's not our actual calories that come from those crops. It's at a high value in Canada, approximately $1 billion in Canada. It's probably fifteenfold that in the U.S. in terms of the value of pollination to agriculture. It's a huge amount worldwide. It's estimated to be in the hundreds of trillions.
We've heard lots over the years and of late about struggles of pollinators and this is due to honeybees and wild bees. These are well documented. We hear a lot about honeybees, but not so much about the wild bees. These are large numbers of organisms. We have about 20,000 species of wild bees on the planet. We have close to 1,000 in Canada, and these are also very important for pollination of our crops. We've heard a lot in the media and through science about the different factors that are affecting honeybees. A lot of these same things affect wild bees as well.
Habitat destruction is a key culprit, I think, for problems that seem to be facing a lot of organisms on this planet. I think whether you're a polar bear in the Arctic or a frog in the Amazon, the destruction of habitat in terms of their nesting sites and the food that they eat is critically important. A lot of the urbanization and agriculture can create ecological deserts that can be very detrimental to pollinators.
Having said that, a lot of agriculture obviously is of benefit to bees and pollinators. I think that's something that is often forgotten. There are many parasites and diseases that plague managed and wild bees. We can talk more about them and there are others I can speak to as well, things like varroa mites and nosema.
The weather is a major factor up here in Canada for bees. It's a real problem for overwintering honeybees. Of course, pesticides are a concern as well in some cases. It's important to bear in mind that we're not simply talking about pesticides that the farmers use, but also the pesticides that beekeepers themselves use. As I mentioned, there are pests and parasites that do affect beekeeping and beekeepers have to try to control those diseases and pests.
I will say a couple of other things. It's great that we have these committees that are addressing these issues and looking into these issues, but these problems are not new. We've known about problems with honeybees for many decades in many different parts of the world. The problems do seem to be increasing of late, but these problems have been going on for many years.
We've also known about declines in wild bees for many years as well. The media has latched onto these ideas, but you can find literature going back decades talking about changes in the distribution and decline of certain wild bee populations. It's important for people not to make blanket statements that all bees are in decline and all bees are dying. The situation varies greatly. Even in Canada, with honeybees, it's inconsistent across the provinces and from year to year what's going on with the health of honeybees.
The other thing I'll say is that we have 20,000 species of wild bees on this planet. In terms of their population dynamics, the long-term community distributions, and the prevalence of different species, we know next to nothing about many of them. We do have a good handle on some species, such as bumblebees, which are big and fuzzy and tend to be well studied, but we lack a lot of baseline data for a lot of the bee species that are out there. This is another cautionary message about making blanket statements about all the bees being in decline. In my opinion, we lack a lot of data. A lot more data is needed on this.
I think there's a lot of good research going on right now. I have benefited a lot from initiatives like the Canadian pollination initiative that Dr. Kevan led. I think it was a great initiative, and I think we need more of that long-term, broad-stroke type of work being done across the country.
I also think that a lot more work needs to be done in the extension area. I think education is the issue that needs to be tackled among beekeepers. We have some excellent beekeepers, but we have a lot of new beekeepers coming online, and beekeeping is difficult. I keep bees myself. You can have hives in the exact same location, and half of them will live and half of them will die. I won't be able to understand why. In the Atlantic provinces, the three maritime provinces have initiated a tech transfer team for apiculture with two new positions in place, and with advisory stakeholders, provincial governments, beekeeping industry producers, and academic areas, as well. There's a strong sense among all of those groups, including myself as part of it, that beekeeper extension work is key in terms of improving the health of honeybees across the country.
Perhaps I'll leave it at that. If anybody else has any questions, I'll happily answer them, of course.