Consider the honeybee

LAUREN KRAMER

Honey is integral to our Rosh Hashanah celebrations, a potent symbol of a sweet new year and a sticky treat on our dining room tables. As we head to the store or farmers market to replenish our supply, few of us stop to think about where it comes from, how much labor goes into a single pound and the sheer vulnerability of its source: the honeybee.

Consider this: to create a single pound of honey, a bee must tap two million flowers. A hive of 50,000 bees must fly a combined distance of more than 55,000 miles to bring that one pound of honey to the table, and that’s at an average speed of 24 kilometres/hour. In its lifetime, a worker bee will make only one-tenth of a teaspoon of honey. That’s a third of the honey we’ll gather on a slice of apple before uttering “L’shana tova u’metuka.” So, at least three bees will spend their life’s labor working for every apple segment we dip into our honey.

Honeybees came to Canada from Eurasia, and “wild” honeybees are escapees from domesticated hives over the years. The colonies adapted to life in the Great White North, forming hives in forests and wooded shelters and generating heat to warm their hives in the winter. Honey in particular is integral to their survival, giving honeybees sufficient energy to sustain themselves through the cold season.

In Canada, the majority of honey production and beekeeping occurs in the West, with Alberta tipping the scales for the highest honey production. Most of the honey available in Canada is domestic and, last year, we exported $51 million of it to other countries.

The biggest threats to honeybees in Canada are a fungus called nosema and a mite called varoa. Between these and the weather, winter losses to bee colonies were as bad as 60 percent six years ago. In recent years, the losses have been less severe, thanks to warmer weather and better controls for dealing with nosema and varoa, but they’re still considerable.

Unfortunately, that’s just where the problems start for Canadian honeybees. They face parasitic infestations in the wild that have spread to some domestic hives in Eastern Canada, loss of habitat and the as-yet-undetermined effects of pesticides on their lifecycle.

Other countries are battling with a more significant and so far inexplicable problem: colony collapse disorder. That’s when a hive’s worker bees abruptly go AWOL. According to the Canada Honey Council, scientists from the United States to France, Spain, Britain and China are racing to solve the mystery of why the honeybee is disappearing. “If we can’t stop it,” the council warns, “all the color and vitality in our food supply will disappear for good, because the honeybee is the cornerstone of the environment and critical to our food supply.”

This year, as you prepare to dip your apple and warmly wish your friends and family a happy New Year, send a silent prayer out to the honeybee, too. The little critters who dance to alert others as to the direction and distance of nectar and pollen are in a vulnerable state these days. We take them for granted, recognizing them more for their sting than for their pivotal role in agriculture, but their fate will certainly change what and how we eat in the years to come. Will our children be dipping apples into honey? Or will they be forced to substitute with maple syrup? Only time will tell.

Lauren Kramer is an award-winning writer in Richmond. Read her work at laurenblogshere.com.

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