Thank you very much for that, Mr. Viersen.
I provide hives for hybrid canola seed pollination. Those hybrid canola seed pollination hives that I bring down represent 80% of the yield that will come off that field.
Now, if you go to blueberry pollination, the number of times a honeybee visits that blossom is going to dictate how big that berry is going to be. It represents a significant portion of the yield as well. It will be somewhere between 70% to 90% of the yield that comes from that honeybee pollination.
The challenges are in trying to maintain the numbers. When I put the bees into blueberry pollination, or when I put the bees into canola pollination, the hives are stressed. There's an overpopulation of bees in that particular area, and they're looking for food wherever they can get it. They are going to fly to the biggest source of honey, nectar and pollen that they can get.
When they come out, they're usually hungry. They're usually stressed, because they've been stuck on one diet. Imagine, if you will, the only thing you can eat is McDonald's happy meals. You can do that for a little while, but after the second week, you're going to break out, you're going to get sick and it's not going to be all that healthy for you.
Our effort is to try to get the bees in as quickly as we can and get them out as quickly as we can, but this is something that stresses the bees.
Keeping the hive numbers up, so that we can have enough hives to be able to do this year after year, becomes a challenge. Importing packaged bees from offshore, which is the only available source that we have right now, is one step and one tool that we have in our tool box to maintain the numbers so that we can provide effective pollination services to both the canola and the blueberry commodity groups. There's a total of 21 commodity groups that bees pollinate for. I could list some of them for you, but for time, I'm not going to.
I could submit them to the committee at a later time in an email.