Beekeeper’s group outlines pesticide concerns to Ontario’s premier

by SUSAN MANN

Representatives from the Ontario Beekeepers’ Association wanted to ensure Ontario Agriculture Minister and Premier Kathleen Wynne understood there was a “sense of urgency” to finding a solution on the threat to bee health from neonicotinoid use in field crops seed treatments.

“We made sure she understood that (the sense of urgency),” says president Dan Davidson. He and two other association members, vice president Tibor Szabo and board member Dennis Edell, met with Wynne at Queen’s Park in Toronto for about 30 minutes late Tuesday afternoon.

Davidson says they told her “what was happening with beekeepers. There are some beekeepers that aren’t going to last this season financially just with the way things are dying in their hives.”

He adds that beekeepers “don’t have time. It seems that everything that comes up - it’s a two year study or something like that.”

There are about 3,000 beekeepers in Ontario but only about 500 commercial scale producers, and Davidson estimates 10 per cent of them are in danger of losing their livelihood this year. The Ontario Beekeepers’ Association has about 800 to 900 members, Davidson says.

Association members also floated the idea of compensation for the damages beekeepers have already experienced. But “I don’t think that one went too far with her,” he says, noting that a monetary figure for damage compensation wasn’t discussed because of the tight timeline of the meeting.

About a ban on neonicotinoid use in Ontario, Davidson says it came up during the meeting. Calling for a ban is still the association’s position and has been for almost a year, but the province likes to defer to Health Canada’s Pest Management Regulatory Agency “on that one” and it doesn’t seem like the association is getting anywhere with the agency on a ban, he says.

Not all beekeepers are in favour of banning neonicotinoid use. Hugh Simpson of Feversham southwest of Collingwood resigned from the Ontario Beekeepers Association board in October 2013 because “I couldn’t really support the singular focus on the solution to neonicotinoid use being a ban. I had a view that the way forward was to work with the invested stakeholders,” including other farmers who use the pesticides “with some notion of collaboration, cooperation and compromise built into the conversation.”

Simpson and others have formed a new group called the Independent Commercial Beekeepers Organization made up of about 20 commercial beekeepers with a total of 15,000 to 20,000 beehives. The membership is independent and members are free to join or leave other beekeeping or farm organizations, he says.

The group has been forming during the past six months to “focus on issues and areas of interest that may not be as germane to a broader group of beekeeping hobbyists; individuals who keep bees for pleasure or maybe because of their environmental interest. Ours is a business,” he says. “At the moment we were not able to find a forum that brought that kind of focus to the agenda.”

Simpson, who describes himself as a small, commercial beekeeper with 300 beehives producing about 30,000 pounds of honey annually, and representatives from the Independent Commercial Beekeepers Organization were not invited to Tuesday’s meeting with Wynne.

The use of neonicotinoids is on the commercial beekeepers organization’s agenda because it’s topical but it’s not the focus of the group, Simpson says. The commercial beekeepers’ group is focusing on lots of matters, such as the price and marketing of honey, equipment issues, treatments for pests and diseases, the economy and labour.

“We were not formed because of the current pesticide discussion,” he says. “It just happens to be one of the things that needs to be on the agenda.”

Davidson described the Ontario beekeepers’ association meeting with Wynne as being “positive.” Wynne is committed to the issue of bee health and “she does want to find a solution, so that’s positive.”

Beekeepers want a solution that “suits everyone too,” Davidson says. BF