Pandemic affects beekeepers but demand high for local honey

By Sean Feagan, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Despite disruptions to their operations, business has been buzzing for some smaller, local honey producers.

Up to $1 million of funding to commercial beekeepers was announced by the province on June 5. These funds are part of the Canadian Agricultural Partnership, a five-year, $3-billion federal-provincial-territorial investment in agriculture and related sectors.

According to Connie Philips, executive director of the Alberta Beekeepers Commission, the funding will help 168 commercial beekeepers in Alberta offset costs of colony replacement caused by COVID-19. 

In 2019, there were 1,474 beekeepers in Alberta, accounting for 303,500 hives, according to data from Statistics Canada. Last year, they produced around 25 million pounds of honey worth about $45 million, representing about 40 per cent of the nation’s honey production. However, 2019 was a tough year for beekeepers in the province, as production fell by 35 per cent, which was attributed to cold and wet conditions during spring and summer.

The tough times continued into the winter, with many beekeepers experiencing high overwintering losses, said Philips. Then, when the pandemic was declared in early spring, travel and import restrictions prevented or slowed the recovery of many hives, she explained. The implementation of travel restrictions resulted in labour shortages, which meant colonies could not be fed adequately as they became active. 

“During the early part of the season, when the bees are getting started and coming out from winter, they all need to be fed,” said Philips. “With the delay in foreign workers, a lot of bees starved to death because you couldn’t get enough people out to feed them during that early part of the spring.”

Many beekeepers typically supplement their colonies early in the season with bees imported from abroad, giving them a head start during the early honey season. However, imports were halted because of COVID-19, meaning many beekeepers were unable to boost their bee numbers.

“When the airlines stopped flying and all those packages are imported from New Zealand, Australia and Chile, those bees couldn’t get here,” said Philips. “There wasn’t a means to replace the losses.”

The government funding will support about 13,000 replacement colonies. “The program is not fully developed, but the intention is to help those beekeepers who can begin to build back up so we can create some balance so that they could get ready for winter and be better ready for next year,” said Philips.

The restrictions on imports also challenged smaller producers and hobbyists, explained Cam Wright of Uncle Lee’s Bees, a 12-colony beekeeping outfit that operates in Wheatland County.

When beekeepers are starting out or are aiming to strengthen their colonies, they buy “packages” from abroad, which are cardboard boxes or tubes containing about five pounds of bees. “They’re relatively economical for someone just starting out,” he said.

“For some small operations that had heavy winter losses, they couldn’t get packages in, because the government shut down importing from New Zealand,” said Wright. “That slowed them down a little.”

Wright added these beekeepers had another, albeit more expensive, option to supplement their colonies’ numbers: buying local. 

“Existing beekeepers that were already operating were able to take their colonies and split them, and sell them to new beekeepers,” said Wright. “There’s still an availability for people wanting to buy these bees; it just means you’re not bringing in the cheaper option.

“Instead of buying the package for $250 to $275, you’re maybe buying the split with another beekeeper for $350 to $400.”

While small producers are facing challenges just like the large commercial operations, they have benefitted from increased demand for local honey because of the pandemic, said Wright.

“With stores running out of product, it seems there was a shift towards buying local, buying natural and supporting your neighbours,” he said. “What that led to is we sold out very quickly.

“Speaking with a number of our colleagues, they had similar experiences, where they noticed they were selling more – Calgary beekeepers have noticed the same trend,” he added.

The pandemic is still affecting how beekeepers are selling their product, however. As per the province’s stage two relaunch guidelines, producers are recommended to limit farmgate sales of honey or use a noncontact method of payment and have been told to limit visitors whenever possible.

Despite local honey flying off the shelves, “there’s still plenty of small beekeepers that would be very happy to sell you their honey,” said Wright. “Supporting local means being part of a community, and by buying local you’re keeping us as a community.”