It's almost a certainly that a percentage of Alberta beekeepers won't be in the business later this year.
It's been an especially difficult year for beekeepers thanks to a number of factors including a long cold winter, that started earlier than usual and also the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Connie Phillips with the Alberta beekeepers commission says it's estimated that more than 50 thousand hives were lost over the winter. Phillips says in a typical year, when springtime arrives, those beekeepers would order replacement bees from various parts of the world and they would be shipped by air. But as the pandemic deepened and many international flights were cancelled, those shipments weren't possible. She says for keepers that rely on temporary foreign workers to help with the hives in the springtime, the pandemic also meant many of those workers had to jump through additional hoops in order to get here. By time some of them did, the bees had starved to death.
Phillips says she's heard that at least 2 or 3 beekeeper operations in the province will go out of business this year. But she also says beekeepers are resilient and if they can find a way to move forward, they will. Alberta produces the most honey of any province in the country.
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