Keeping honey bee queens healthy through Canadian winters

As Canadians prepare for the long winter months ahead, UBC’s Dr. Leonard Foster is working to help another species survive the bitter cold—honey bees.

Dr. Foster, a professor in UBC’s department of biochemistry and molecular biology and at Michael Smith Laboratories, has been awarded nearly $4.5 million in federal funding to evaluate strategies for supporting overwintering honey bee queens in Canada. The funding comes from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) joint Sustainable Agriculture Research Initiative (SARI).

Honey bees are essential to the agriculture industry in Canada, providing $7 billion in value through pollinating crops such as blueberries and the oilseed crop from which canola oil is extracted.

However, many bee colonies don’t make it through the Canadian winter due to pests and increasingly extreme weather events caused by climate change. Over ¼ of colonies are lost each year, and new queen bees need to be flown in as replacements from the USA, Italy, Ukraine, New Zealand and Chile – flights which have high costs in the form of greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr. Foster’s project is looking to find ways to help honey bee queens survive the winter months, which would reduce the need to import over 350,000 queen bees each year.

“Our project aims to complete a systematic evaluation of different strategies for overwintering honey bee queens, including an evaluation of the economics of different strategies,” says Dr. Foster.

Recognizing that strategies need to be region-specific, as winter looks different across the country, Dr. Foster has partnered with researchers at the University of Lethbridge and Université Laval.

“This funding will support a coordinated effort across BC, Alberta and Quebec to test various overwintering strategies, annually iterating through different variables to arrive at best practices depending on which region of Canada you are in,” explains Dr. Foster.

At the end of this four-year project, the team will share their findings with beekeepers across the country so new strategies can be put into practice, helping the agriculture sector to become more sustainable in the years to come.