As cottage lovers know, protecting bees and their habitat is of the utmost importance to ensuring the health of our natural world and our food chain. But one innovative program is taking bee care even further and developing programs to breed at-risk species.
Wildlife Preservation Canada is on a mission to save species at risk from extinction by providing direct, hands-on care. They operate a one-of-a-kind Bumble Bee Conservation Lab in Guelph, Ont., and they’re developing new breeding techniques focused on the yellow-banded bumble bee. As Lance Woolaver, WPC’s executive director, explains, caring for bees has been a top priority for years.
“WPC began working with endangered bumble bees in 2013. As such we now have more experience working with bumble bee conservation than most other organizations in Canada,” he says. “The Bumble Bee Conservation Lab in its current successful form is fairly recent and was established in 2021. We could see the major declines happening rapidly in Canada’s native bumble bees and knew we had to act, not just talk about the problem, but do something practical and immediate,” says Woolaver. “We identified a major gap in bumble bee conservation: no one knew how to breed threatened species in captivity. This is critically important if assurance populations are needed to keep a species from going extinct and to assist with future reintroductions.”
The lab’s staff start their work in spring, with field crews searching for bumble bee queens throughout Ontario. Selected queens come to the lab, where they are housed in small plastic boxes and treated, well, like the queens they are. The team combines nectar and pollen to make tiny pollen balls to feed the bees, and the environment is carefully controlled for both temperature and humidity.
Beekeeping may become more accessible with this new hive
With the support of the African Lion Safari theme park (located just outside Hamilton), WPC sets up small outdoor enclosures from late August to early October. You might even be able to see the team at work from a distance if you’re visiting the park. Select bees are placed within enclosures, hoping that mating will occur. The staff have experimented with different kinds of enclosures to see what works best, using flight cages, colony boxes, and even the queen starter box (the same box which houses the queen after she is first collected in the field).
The team’s painstaking labours have been paying off. “The two biggest success stories of 2024 were that we successfully bred our focal species, yellow-banded bumble bees, through their entire lifecycle for the first time,” says Woolaver. “The first successful overwintering of yellow-banded bumble bees last winter allowed us to establish our first lab generation, doubling our mating successes and significantly increasing the number of young queens for overwintering to wake early spring and start their own colonies for future generations and future reintroductions.”
We can all help WPC in its efforts. “Be aware that our native bumble bees really are in serious decline so when cottagers see bumble bees pollinating plants in their gardens, they really are seeing something special,” says Woolaver.
Wild Profile: Meet the bumble bee
Having a pollinator friendly cottage garden and avoiding pesticides are two ways you can support the WPC’s bumblebee protection efforts. You can also monitor the bee community through Bumble Bee Watch. Since 2014, this multi-partner platform has allowed users to submit photos of bumble bees, which are then verified by experts, providing crucial monitoring data of the bees’ health and territory across North America.
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