Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Brendan Daisley, Banting Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Guelph
Every spring, Canadian beekeepers await the arrival of queen bees crucial to their industry. The queens that populate Canadian bee colonies through the season largely do not come from Canada at all.
Canada imports approximately 260,000 to 300,000 queen bees annually from warmer regions like Hawaii, California, Chile and New Zealand because it cannot meet domestic demand.
This system works for now, but it’s much more fragile than most Canadians might realize. Honey bees pollinate a huge share of what we eat (from blueberries and apples to canola and clover), sustaining billions of dollars in crop production in Canada each year. Yet the resilience of this system hinges on the health of a single individual, the queen.
Canadian honey bee colonies face multiple pressures. New research we conducted with colleagues found that while antibiotic use in Canadian beekeeping fell significantly following regulatory changes in 2018, the number of bees that died over winter each year rose in parallel.
That suggests that removing antibiotics without alternative ways of bolstering resilience may be quietly making colonies more vulnerable.
Our study also identified nitrogen dioxide, a common air pollutant from diesel exhaust, as a strong predictor of bee mortality, because it masks flower scents and makes foraging harder.
Why import queens?
Every honey bee colony is led by one queen: the sole reproducer, the source of the colony’s genetic makeup and a key regulator of the whole colony’s survival, immunity and social behaviour.
Her strength determines the colony’s longevity, population size, brood pattern and ultimately, its productivity. When queens fail, colonies fail. In surveys across Canada, poor queen health is consistently cited as a leading cause of colony losses, especially during winter.
Read more:
Worker honey bees can sense infections in their queen, leading to revolt
Queens can only be raised within a short window, April to September, with many not available until late May. Canada cannot currently produce enough high-quality queens to meet its beekeeping industry’s needs.
This leaves domestic producers unable to meet demand in spring. Importing queens fills the demand within those crucial early spring months, but it also introduces new problems: the queens typically come from warm, stable climates and are often ill-suited to Canadian winters.
Imported queens face challenges
Research shows that domestically raised queens are 25 per cent more likely to survive winter than imported ones. Some imported stock also shows higher rates of brood diseases like chalkbrood.
Over years of repeated importation, this can gradually dilute locally adapted genetics, making Canada’s national bee population progressively less equipped to handle the environment it lives in.
There is also a policy risk that rarely makes headlines. Canada permits queen imports from only a small number of approved countries.
A trade dispute, new disease outbreak or biosecurity concerns could cut off that supply almost overnight, leaving beekeepers queenless, with immediate consequences for the crops depending on those colonies.
Importance of the queen’s microbiome
Researchers have long focused on genetics, nutrition, diseases and pesticides when studying worker and queen bee health. But mounting evidence suggests another factor that has been overlooked: the microbiome, a community of beneficial microbes living inside the bees themselves.
Imagine it like the gut bacteria that influence human immunity and digestion. Over the last two decades, medicine has transformed the way human gut microbiomes can affect disease resistance and mental well-being.
Bee researchers are beginning to ask the same questions and finding that the balance of microbial communities does indeed affect bee health, longevity and agrochemical resiliency.
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Worker bee microbiomes often get disproportionate research focus compared to the queen microbiome, despite her immense role in overall colony success and reproduction.
However, early evidence suggests that queens have distinct microbiomes that can influence and are influenced in turn by lifespan, reproduction levels and immunity — all of which act as signals that regulate the colony. If queens are the foundational “gene engines” of colonies, their microbiomes may be the unrecognized microbial infrastructure that supports them.
Critically, those microbial communities can be shaped by environment and rearing practices, temperature and time of year and region.
An imported queen may arrive not only with genetics attuned to a warmer climate, but with a microbiome equally mismatched to Canadian forage plants, pathogens and seasonal stress. The mismatch may be more complex and more consequential than genetics alone suggests.
The Canadian Bee Gut Project
Our research group at the University of Guelph launched the Canadian Bee Gut Project — a nationwide effort to map the microbiomes of honey bee colonies from coast to coast, working with commercial beekeepers, breeders and provincial teams.
We are now expanding that work to focus specifically on queens, comparing the microbiomes of domestic and imported stock to identify which microbial communities are associated with successful overwintering in Canada.
The goal is to develop practical tools such as microbiome-informed rearing practices, targeted interventions to restore beneficial microbes and support domestic breeding programs that can produce cold-adapted queens resilient to disease.
Canada’s reliance on imported queens is understandable, but it isn’t sustainable in the long term.
Climate instability, border policy shifts, new disease threats and rising colony mortality rates all put pressure on our beekeeping and food production systems.
Building a more resilient food system means reducing that dependence. That requires better breeding and a deeper understanding of the biology that makes queens thrive or fail in Canadian conditions.
The answer to stronger, more self-reliant beekeeping in this country may be inside the bees themselves.
Brendan Daisley received research funding from Food from Thought at the University of Guelph, the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, and a Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Elizabeth Mallory does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. Importing queen bees won’t solve Canada’s beekeeping problems – https://theconversation.com/importing-queen-bees-wont-solve-canadas-beekeeping-problems-277739