Deadly bee disease may have hit Canada
By DENE MOORE / The Canadian Press
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MIRABEL, Que. — Christian Macle stands amid a cloud of bees and carefully lifts the lid off one of his hives.
Lower down on the hive, honeybees heavy with bright yellow pollen from the surrounding orchard stagger in. Macle pulls out the hanging honeycombs one by one.
Tucked in the rolling hills of farm country north of Montreal, Macle’s Intermiel Inc. is making out better this year than many other apiaries.
A massive die-off of bees is underway in the U.S. It’s turned up in Europe and may have already landed in Canada.
The ailment, dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, is so far a mystery.
"We don’t know what’s wrong," said Heather Clay, national co-ordinator for the Canadian Honey Council.
Twenty-seven U.S. states have been affected, reporting losses of up to 90 per cent, and the ailment seems to be moving north, Clay said.
New Brunswick has lost about 85 per cent of its bee colonies. Ontario beekeepers have lost about one-third, and Quebec 40 per cent so far.
And nobody is sure why.
Large-scale die-offs have occurred before. Most recently, the arrival of the Varroa mite in Canada in 1989 had devastating effects. Just last year Macle lost 80 per cent of his colonies to Varroa.
But in previous cases bees were found dead in their hives, the culprit identifiable. With Colony Collapse Disorder, they’re just not found at all.
"It’s a very mysterious disease," says Dr. Maria Perrone, senior staff veterinarian at the animal health division of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency in Ottawa. "Nobody knows the cause of it yet.
"It’s characterized by the bees just disappearing from the hive. . . . There’s no evidence of any adult bees anywhere around the hive and nobody knows what happened to them."
Perrone said the situation is being monitored but there is no conclusive evidence that the disease has spread north.
"All of the provinces are aware of the problem in the United States," Perrone says.
"There have been some heavy losses in some areas of Canada but they haven’t been attributed to CCD because there are a lot of other possible causes for why these bees would die."
Some blame pesticide or a new parasite, others climate change. There is even one theory that cellphone radiation is responsible.
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