I want to give an anecdote from my own operation. For years and years, I tried to build up my operation and expand the number of hives that I had. I was buying packages from New Zealand. I would take those packages and shake the contents into my hives. In the first spring, they would do all right. It would take a long time to build up, because we're getting bees that are ready to go into winter and then putting them into spring, hoping that they're going to behave like spring bees. It takes a little while for that to happen.
They would go into winter not too badly. The next spring they would come out. They would be some of the best bees that I had. I would find by the third spring that when they come out of winter there was a 50% to 80% winter loss among them. I was scratching my head trying to figure out why that was happening. The one hypothesis I have regarding that is that New Zealand has varroa mites. They have been using Apivar there for an awful lot longer.... Perhaps the varroa mites that are coming in with these packages have a degree of resistance, and I'm bringing that into my operation. I've been importing that in there.
Furthermore, if I buy packages from Australia or New Zealand, and I have them with queens from there, most of those bees will not make it through that first winter, because they are not genetically adapted to being able to survive this winter. I need to buy them on pheromone strips, and I need to introduce queens where there's been a partnership—like Albert Robertson, from Saskatchewan, has with Olivarez queens in California—and with genetics that work here in Canada.