The winters of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 have been a double-whammy for bees. At least in our backyard. Damp autumns, soggy plus dangerously late springs. I'm not holding out much hope for the handful of hives barely visible in the backyard. And I'm not at all happy about paying a ridiculous price to basically start from scratch in less than a week.
See, the problem is that the go-to source for imported honeybees, a.k.a. the United States, is pretty much off-limits (some Queens excepted) because of parasite/disease issue (and no doubt the usual tribal stupidities besides...glad we passed NAFTA and all...). The most logical Canadian sources (Vancouver Island, southwestern British Colombia, and southern Nova Scotia) don't seem much interested in filling the gap. Or, for all I know, they're just overwhelmed. So obscene amounts of fossil fuels are expended to import honeybee "packages" (basically starter colonies) from--I kid you not--New Zealand.
From what I can see, the importers (at least the ones we're working with) are almost gratuitously conscientious about it all--even escorting the bees on their journey and making sure they're fed and all. I'm not knocking them...however much I might envy their trip to New Zealand this time of year.
Okay, so I'm willing to meet Mother Nature more than halfway by tilting at the windmill of keeping honeybees alive into the next spring by dint of making sure they're healthy and well fed (to the extent that such contrary beasties will allow me to intervene). I'm certainly not above hacking besides. (Mind you, with electronics--i.e. logging temperature & humidity readings--you're fighting the triple-whammy of unreliable power supplies, the even less reliable elements, and the bees' propensity to shellac everything that's not comb with a substance known as propolis. Making it all affordable for beekeepers working on precarious margins is another subject altogether.)
Those are the challenges. But I would take it kindly if the governments of Canada and the United States would, in tandem, extract their craniums from their backsides and figure out how allow healthy, cold-tolerant bees to cross the border in volume. Even back in Wisconsin, I found the reliance on southern (by which I mean less cold-hardy) bees silly. Particularly when some of the most notable pollinator research in the U.S. is being done by the University of Minnesota. I would argue that, all other things being equal, regional boundaries count for much more than national ones.
Given that one out of three bites we take has to be pollinated, my left brain fails to grok how this sort of thing is not a priority for any government. Particularly for a government so obsessed about national security that it has time to care about who wears what during a citizenship ceremony or is willing to bomb people on sketchy second-hand rationales or wants to classify anything threatening the economy of Canada as "terrorism. "
