Agriculture committee  I know that this is something that has come up in the past. It's something that I talked about with Mr. Drouin back in March when I met with him. The bottom line is this: Farming has to be profitable. Everybody wants to have sustainability. Everybody wants to have biodiversity.

Agriculture committee  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.

Agriculture committee  Yes, there's a whole pile of different subspecies. The general species is Apis mellifera. There are subspecies of Apis mellifera. From Africa, there are four subspecies. Paul van Westendorp can probably name them better than I can. I can name three of them. There are Apis mellifera lamarckii, scutellata and monticola.

Agriculture committee  At present, the Alberta Beekeepers Commission is advocating for importing packaged bees from northern California. Simply, we've historically imported queens from northern California since 2005 into Canada without any incident of any failure of any sort. We would like to start there.

Agriculture committee  It's a bit of a misnomer. Everyone likes to equate a bee to a cow or a chicken—not so. It is that colony, the cluster of bees living on that comb, that is the living organism. That is the revenue unit, and that's how you need to be seeing it. It is more akin to a gopher that comes up in the spring, walks around in your yard and then goes back into dormancy in the winter time, or a bear.

Agriculture committee  That's a very good question, and it deserves a lot longer answer than what I can give. I will give a short answer here, but if you would like, I could follow that up with an e-mail after we've had the meeting here. There are four risks that are identified in the 2013 risk assessment.

Agriculture committee  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.

Agriculture committee  Bees survive the winter by having a massive group hug. I get asked the question, “Do they hibernate?” No, they don't hibernate. What bees do when it gets cold is cluster together and form a tight ball. They form a CO2 bubble that they live in, which lowers their metabolism rate, and they are able to keep the temperature inside that cluster.

Agriculture committee  My name is Ron Greidanus. I want to thank you for your invitation to speak today on bee mortality, which has been an industry challenge for the last 30 years. I'm here today speaking for the Alberta Beekeepers Commission and for all of those beekeepers who, across this country, do not feel heard by their own provincial associations.