Beekeepers working to revolutionize Canadian honey industry with locally-sourced queens

It might come as no surprise that Canada's cold climate can pose a problem for beekeepers, with a 2025 report from the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists' finding that over 41 per cent of Alberta honeybee colonies failed that winter.

It's an issue Calgary-area company Beekeeping Innovations Ltd. has devised an innovative solution for: the Bee Cube, an apiary with a fully climate-controlled environment capable of housing multiple honeybee colonies, designed in Okotoks.

"The goal is to get bees through the winter in a comfortable environment," said Herman Van Reekum, the company's founder and CEO.

But beyond helping bees survive the winter, the Bee Cube presents an opportunity the group says could shake up Canada's beekeeping industry.

"The real goal that we've figured out is how to make queens, how to reproduce queens in a very safe, in a very economical way, and this this is an ideal system for that," Van Reekum said.

"Our major use case for this Bee Cube is to produce queens," Van Reekum said. "We want to make queens in big numbers so that we don’t have to import them to Canada. We need our own resilient stock."

He says Canadian beekeepers rely heavily on importing foreign queen bees, typically bringing in around 300,000 a year from warmer places like Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S. states of California and Hawaii.

"If you introduce a queen that has never been here, she's not going to do as well," he said.

And beyond the challenges of acclimating to a vastly different environment, imported bees carry the risk of bringing in dangerous pests like varroa mites, which have devastated honeybee colonies locally and worldwide.

He pointed to another pest that could be even more destructive: the Tropilaelaps mite, which hasn't established itself in North America but has been found in honeybee colonies in Asia, Europe and Africa.

"If that mite gets to North America, it would be devastating," he said. "As beekeepers, we have to do our best to not import foreign bees."

"If we could do away with that and create our own domestic source of queens, we'd be lot safer," he said.

Van Reekum says breeding local queens would keep mite infection rates down and potentially produce bees with a genetic advantage to survive the bitter cold of Canadian winters.

Whether in the wild or an apiary, each hive has one queen bee, which is selected as a larva and fed a special meal called royal jelly. This extra protein is what triggers the developing larva to become a queen bee rather than a worker bee.

She's the only bee in the hive that can lay eggs, making her a critical component of any beekeeper's colony.

"There can't be two queens roaming around freely in a hive," Van Reekum said. "One queen will will kill the other one."

To create more queens, fellow beekeeper Nazar Pukshyn says "queen cells" from one hive are inserted into a colony without an existing queen.

A queen-less colony is required because if a colony already has a queen, the bees will not want to build new queen cells.

The beekeepers place the frame of grafted larvae inside, and they return the next day to check how many larvae the bees have accepted.

The queens emerge as adults after about two weeks. Because the first queen to emerge will kill the other queen cells, the beekeepers must carefully monitor the days of emergence and keep the newly emerging queens in individual cages to prevent them from killing each other.

Queens are taken to their own hives where, after about a week, they mate with drone bees — males whose primary purpose is to mate with a queen — after which they can start laying about 2,000 eggs a day and establishing their own colonies.

Van Reekum says a mother queen that has successfully survived a Canadian winter could pass along strong genes to her offspring — including future queens — to carry their hive through the winter.

"We produced about 800 last year," he said. "This year we'd like to make 5,000."

There are over 16,000 beekeepers and 850,000 bee colonies in Canada, according to the federal government.

Of those, Alberta is home to nearly 40 per cent of the country's colonies. The province is the largest honey producer in Canada.

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Canada's 2025 honey harvest was valued at $241 million. Beyond honey, Canadian beekeeping also plays a critical role in providing pollination services to many farmers, contributing billions in agricultural economic impact.

"Thirty-three per cent of what we eat comes from bees pollinating our crops," Van Reekum said. "The canola, the orchards, the blueberries, all these food that we like to eat, stuff that tastes real good, wouldn't be here without honeybees pollinating them."