We would like to share information regarding a new honey bee health surveillance activity currently being conducted by the Government of Alberta’s Bee Health Assurance Team (BHAT).
As the Government of Alberta has not yet broadly communicated details regarding this new surveillance activity, many producers may not yet be aware of the program or how it differs from the existing suite of Colony Health Monitoring services delivered by ABC’s Tech Transfer Program (TTP) team.
With that in mind, we wanted to highlight how the TTP’s Colony Health Monitoring (CHM) Program continues to provide producers with timely, actionable, operation-specific reporting and recommendations designed to support informed decision-making and maintain the health and performance of your colonies.
The CHM Program allows producers to identify specific yards or colonies for targeted monitoring based on operational priorities, risk factors, or existing concerns.
The government surveillance activity will operate in a very similar manner to ABC’s CHM Program. A key difference is that BHAT will not allow producers to select which yards are sampled. Instead, participating yards will be selected through an randomized lottery system .
The government used a lottery system intended to create a randomized selection of beekeepers from across Alberta. However, beekeepers with 50 or fewer colonies were excluded from the lottery, while larger operations received multiple entries based on their number of yards, increasing the likelihood that commercial-scale producers would be selected for surveillance while effectively excluding the majority of hobbyist beekeepers.
The CHM Program is designed to provide personalized technical support tailored to individual operations. Diagnostic findings are interpreted within the context of each beekeeper’s management practices, treatment timing, colony performance, and production goals.
The government’s surveillance activity is intended primarily for the government’s benefit and regulatory monitoring purposes rather than individualized operational consultation.
The CHM Program provides same-day field observations, including varroa levels, overall hive health and visible disease symptoms, with laboratory diagnostic results typically returned within three weeks. Results are accompanied by interpretation, consultation, and practical recommendations to support in-season management decisions.
Under the government’s surveillance program, producers will receive laboratory findings from collected samples; however, the program will not provide operational recommendations or management guidance on how to respond to identified issues. In addition, reports from the surveillance program are not expected to be distributed until late fall, which won’t allow for timely in-season management adjustments.
The BHAT program is administered by the Alberta Government whose role is regulatory oversight. As such, certain findings identified during inspections or sampling activities, including the use of unregistered treatments, will be subject to regulatory reporting requirements.
In contrast, the Commission’s CHM Program is an independent, producer owned and focused service whose primary objective is to support operational decision-making, colony health improvement, and economic performance. Information collected through the CHM Program remains confidential and is shared only with the participating beekeeper.
We recognize that additional bee health data may contribute valuable information on the health of Alberta’s beekeeping industry, however it is not clear yet how the government intends to use the bee health data it is collecting or if it will be available to the industry as a whole. We are also concerned that a significant cohort, the hobby industry appears to have been overlooked/missed in the government’s program.
We believe it is important that producers clearly understand the differences in mandate, confidentiality, reporting structure, and intended use of information collected under each program.
For more information on how to take advantage of the TTP’s Colony Health Monitoring program, please reach out to our team at:
EMAIL: ttp@albertabeekeepers.ca | PHONE: 780.288.7417