Good afternoon.
My name is Dan Winter. I'm a second-generation commercial beekeeper from New York state. I do both commercial crop pollination and honey production. Currently, I'm president of the American Beekeeping Federation. I'm also on the New York State Apiary Industry Advisory Committee. Most recently, I was nominated to the National Honey Board.
I'd like to take a minute to talk about honeybee mortality in the United States in general. Most of the information is available from the Bee Informed Partnership. They have a 16-year mortality average that they have been working on with the USDA. That's available at the beeinformed.org website.
In the Bee Informed Partnership's managed honeybee loss estimates from April 2020 to April 2021 in the United States, beekeepers lost about 45.5%. These are very unsustainable levels of mortality, as I'm sure you already know in Canada. These rates continue to rise even despite a 50-state pollinator protection plan that went into effect under President Barack Obama, where all 50 states in the United States were required to develop a pollinator protection plan in order to help alleviate honeybee losses.
Now, the ABF attributes that managed pollinator mortality to be directly related to three main factors: pests and parasites; nutrition and problems associated with agri-chemicals; and synergistic problems when honeybees mix these contaminated pollens within the beehive.
A lot of chemicals are studied on an individual basis. Dr. Diana Cox-Foster from the ARS lab in Utah has done a lot of studies on the synergistic problems with adjuvants and things like that, which are added to chemicals when they are mixed together. As you know, honeybees bring pollen into the beehive, and they mix pollens together into a thing called “bee bread”, which they feed to their larvae.
The bee bread can contain several different chemicals, and rarely are these chemicals studied together within the beehive. I think that's where a lot of the testing and chemical residue studies have actually fallen short. I don't think they're taking into account that the bees themselves are mixing the chemicals within the hives.
I think that working toward more sustainable agriculture in the future is one of the only ways that we're going to alleviate pollinator losses. We have to remember, too, that what's good for managed pollinators is also good for native pollinators, so this would be a win-win across the board if we can start to develop this and look at how these chemicals affect each other within the beehive and stop looking at individual chemicals as a huge problem within the beehive.
Now, another pest we have is the Tropilaelaps mite. That is currently in Asia and has not been a problem in North America, but if that mite were to be imported into Canada or the U.S. via packages or things like that, the Tropilaelaps mite breeds three times faster than the current varroa mite and, therefore, honey production would sink to near nothing, because beekeepers would have to treat their colonies constantly to be able to keep up with commercial pollination demands. Therefore, we need to be proactive and not reactive when it comes to the Tropilaelaps mite. We really don't want to see that get into North America.
It has been brought to the American Beekeeping Federation's attention that Canada is importing some packages from some questionable areas. Now, again, we just worry about the commercial and the pollination and how that will affect our industry and our food resources. We would strongly like the Canadian Parliament to possibly consider importing packages from the United States, because they are a much lower risk, and we would entertain that fact and help to work on possible ways that we could make that happen so that our risks to commercial pollination in the United States and in Canada are drastically reduced.
The way we move bees around North America, a mite like that would spread so fast it would be catastrophic to our industry. We really need to follow the science on this, look at Dr. Samuel Ramsey's studies in Asia about this mite and be proactive in trying to keep it out of North America.
Thank you very much for your time. We really appreciate you inviting the American Beekeeping Federation to these hearings.
Thank you.