Genetic solutions help sustain Saskatchewan honey industry.

The future of Saskatchewan's honey industry--currently valued at about $40 million a year--is being threatened by a couple of parasitic insect pests that prey on honeybees. With genetic resistance in bees offering a promising defense against these pests, Saskatchewan researchers are collaborating with the provincial industry and national and international partners to identify and breed pest-resistant bees.

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Saskatchewan is considered one of the best places in the world to produce honey. Long summer days and abundant fields of flowering canola, alfalfa, sweet clover and borage support production rates averaging 85 kilograms per hive or more, making our industry the most productive in Canada, if not the world.

Our national and international reputation for pure, high-quality honey products contributes to an industry involving 1,300 beekeepers and 100,000 colonies. The majority of the 8.6 million kilograms of honey produced here each year is exported to the United States and Europe.

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Honey and honey products produced in Saskatchewan have a variety of uses. In addition to being a mild-flavored food and food ingredient, it is also added to medicine, cosmetics and food supplements. Industry byproducts, such as pollen, beeswax and royal jelly, offer additional income opportunities.

Bees also play an important role in pollinating crops, especially fruits. In North America, honeybee products and pollination services are valued at over $1 billion a year.

Parasitic Varroa and tracheal mites are causing serious shortages of honeybees, resulting in substantial economic losses in the honeybee industry worldwide. In recent years, this problem has been compounded by the discovery of Varroa mites resistant to all licensed chemical treatments.

Entire honeybee operations have been lost in the eastern U.S. The threat of Varroa mites spreading to Canada from the U.S. led to the closure of the Canadian border to bee imports in 1987. Nevertheless, many Canadian colonies have been damaged.

The tracheal mite arrived in Saskatchewan in 1987 and the Varroa mite in 1995. So far, a system of quarantines, movement restrictions, chemical treatment of affected apiaries, and mapping of apiary locations has helped beekeepers restrict the tracheal mite to half of the colonies in the province and Varroa to less than 10 per cent of the hives.

Since the value of honey is closely tied to its image of purity, the possibility that honey contains chemical residues could undermine product sales. Consequently, beekeepers generally feel the best solution to pest problems is to breed bees with a heritable resistance to parasitic mites. Saskatchewan researchers are therefore collaborating with the Saskatchewan Beekeepers' Association (SBA) in a program designed to improve genetic resistance to mites.

The SBA and the Ontario Beekeepers Association have been involved for several years in a project to introduce new genetic stock with improved resistance to pathogenic mites. This stock originated from eastern Russia and was reselected in the U.S. by scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A few Saskatchewan honeybee queen breeders have used this stock to build pure Russian lines by using isolated mating procedures. However, a major problem faced by these breeders is the positive identification of the pure lines, since there are no visible characteristics to distinguish Russian from standard Canadian bees.

The SBA initiated a pilot project in 2003 using matching funds from the Canadian Adaptation and Rural Development Program (CARDS) to find genetic markers--distinctive pieces of chromosomes--that can be used to differentiate Russian from Canadian lines. Twenty markers were identified, prompting a more extensive study that is currently underway.

Some of the resistant bee stock was released to commercial producers last year and more will be available this year. Some stock released this year will be screened using the genetic markers identified so far.

Ultimately, developing genetic resistance may provide a safe, reliable and market-friendly solution to a substantial threat to a valuable Saskatchewan industry.

Gerry Brown is Vice-President of the Agriculture/Biotechnology Division at the Saskatchewan Research Council.