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A shift in Bee trades and a change to a nearly 40-year-old US border Policy might be in order to help the Canadian Honey Industry.

Osee Podolski, local honey producer and chair of inter-provincial movement for the Canadian Honey Council, is dreading the losses that his operation, and many in Canada, could see this winter.

"About 2-3 weeks ago, we were sitting at around 11-15% winter loss in the building, and through the harvesting period, from July 1st to October 31st, we lost 24% of our operation. If we extrapolate the data out, it's looking like a 90% overwinter loss by spring. Somewhere around the market of 1.2 million dollars in bees"

The trade of packaged bees was halted in 1986 to stop a parasite, called the varroa destructor mite, from coming to Canada.

Since then, varroa mites have established themselves here despite these measures.

Osee notes this is because bees do not obey land borders, and the border-based beekeepers could have acted as a point of contamination even without trade. 

We'll have more conversations with Podolski about the state of the Beekeeping industry on Monday's noon-hour edition of Agri View.