Calgary beekeepers aim to end reliance on imported queens

An Okotoks-based company is working to transform Canada's beekeeping industry by breeding domestic queen bees instead of importing them by the hundreds of thousands each year.

Beekeeping Innovations Ltd. has designed the Bee Cube, a climate-controlled apiary that solves two persistent problems for Canadian beekeepers: keeping bees alive through brutal winters and producing queens domestically. Over 41 percent of Alberta honeybee colonies failed last winter, according to a 2025 report from the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists.

"The goal is to get bees through the winter in a comfortable environment," said Herman Van Reekum, the company's founder and CEO. But the real breakthrough, he added, is queen production. "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."

Canadian beekeepers currently import around 300,000 queen bees annually from warmer places like Australia, New Zealand, and California and Hawaii. Imported queens struggle to acclimate to Canada's vastly different climate — and they carry serious risks. Varroa mites, which have devastated colonies locally and worldwide, often hitchhike on foreign bees. An even more destructive pest, the Tropilaelaps mite, hasn't reached North America yet but has been found in honeybee colonies across Asia, Europe, and Africa. "If that mite gets to North America, it would be devastating," Van Reekum said.

Breeding local queens with genetic advantages for surviving Canadian winters while keeping mite infection rates down could protect the industry without importing disease and pests. Each hive has one queen, selected as a larva and fed royal jelly — a special protein that triggers her development as a queen rather than a worker bee. Creating more queens requires inserting queen cells from one hive into a colony without an existing queen.