In Canada, beekeepers face challenges due to the cold climate, as highlighted in a 2025 report by the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists, which revealed that more than 41% of honeybee colonies in Alberta failed during that winter. To address this issue, Beekeeping Innovations Ltd., based in the Calgary area, has introduced an innovative solution known as the Bee Cube. This climate-controlled apiary can accommodate multiple honeybee colonies and was developed in Okotoks.
The primary aim of the Bee Cube, according to Herman Van Reekum, the company’s CEO, is to provide bees with a comfortable environment to survive the winter successfully. In addition to aiding bees during the colder months, the Bee Cube offers an opportunity to revolutionize Canada’s beekeeping industry by focusing on queen bee production.
Van Reekum emphasized the importance of producing queens in large numbers within a secure and cost-effective system, reducing the reliance on importing foreign queen bees. Currently, Canadian beekeepers heavily depend on importing approximately 300,000 queen bees annually from warmer regions like Australia, New Zealand, California, and Hawaii. Importing foreign queens not only presents challenges in adapting to a new environment but also poses the risk of introducing harmful pests such as varroa mites and potentially devastating pests like the Tropilaelaps mite to North America.
By breeding local queens, Van Reekum believes that beekeepers can lower mite infection rates and develop bees with genetic resilience to survive the harsh Canadian winters. The process of creating queens involves selecting a larva in a hive and feeding it royal jelly to trigger its development into a queen bee, the sole egg-layer in a colony.
Through techniques like grafting queen cells into queenless colonies, beekeepers can generate new queens, monitor their emergence, and transfer them to individual hives for mating with drone bees. Van Reekum highlighted the importance of nurturing resilient queen bees that can pass on strong genetic traits to future generations, ultimately enhancing the survival chances of bee colonies in Canada.
In Alberta, which houses nearly 40% of Canada’s bee colonies, the honey industry plays a significant role in the country’s agricultural sector, contributing to a $241 million honey harvest in 2025. Beyond honey production, Canadian beekeeping supports crucial pollination services for farmers, enabling the cultivation of various crops essential for human consumption.
Van Reekum stressed the vital role of bees in pollinating crops, emphasizing that approximately 33% of the food we consume relies on bees for pollination. The efforts to strengthen the local bee population through innovative solutions like the Bee Cube are crucial for safeguarding Canada’s beekeeping industry and sustaining agricultural productivity in the long run.