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Canada’sbeedivision
FREDERICK SLADEN, BORN IN
England in 1876, was fascinated with bees
as a child. At the age of 16, he wrote his
first book, on bumblebees. He became an
entomologist and moved with his family
to Canada. In the early 1900s, Sladen
was the lead apiarist with the Dominion
Experimental Farms (now Agriculture and
Agri-Food Canada). He was based at the
Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa,
working with what was in those early days
known as the “bee division.”
Sladen helped establish bee-research
programs at several of the branch farms,
including those in Brandon, MB, and
Lethbridge, Lacombe and Beaverlodge,
AB. The above photo shows an uniden-
tified employee working with several
honeybee hives at the Lethbridge research
farm in 1915.
The bee division had research interests
in all types of bees, including honey-
bees, leafcutter bees and bumblebees. Its
projects looked at bee breeding, feeding
and manipulation; studied bee products;
diagnosed bee diseases; and advanced
other ways of benefitting beekeepers and
improving the overall Canadian beekeep-
ing industry. Work of the bee division
first showed beekeepers how to over-
winter hives outdoors instead of moving
them into root cellars or other protective
structures.
While the bee division is long gone,
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada still
maintains honeybee research work, head-
quartered at the Beaverlodge Research
Farm in Alberta’s Peace River region.
While numbers vary, the Canadian
Honey Council reports that there are
about 7,000 beekeepers in Canada,
operating about 694,000 colonies of
honeybees. Most of those are in Western
Canada, and the majority—about 40 per
cent, or 285,000 of the Canadian hives—
are located in Alberta.
In addition to an important honey
industry, about half of the Canadian bee
colonies are vital to the pollination of
Canada’s 12- to 15-million-tonne canola
crop. And in Alberta, about 80,000 colo-
nies are dedicated to pollinating crops to
produce hybrid canola seed.
Dr. Shelley Hoover, apiculture research
scientist with Alberta Agriculture and For-
estry, based in Lethbridge, said one part
of her wide-ranging research shows that
a combination of bee types—honeybees,
leafcutter bees and bumblebees—is par-
ticularly effective for crop pollination.
AGAINST
THE GRAIN
Spring
2015
Grains
West
50
