Ontario and Canada to invest in honey bee health

Aug 08, 2023

The investment from the two governments will help improve Ontario's beekeeping competitiveness.

By Andrew Joseph, Farms.com; Photo by Brad Weaver on Unsplash

Ontario and the government of Canada have announced an investment of over $1.3 million via the Sustainable Canadian Agricultural Partnership (Sustainable CAP) to help improve the resiliency and competitiveness of beekeeper operations in Ontario.

"Honey bees and the producers who care for them play a vital role in the production and diversity of high-value agricultural crops in Ontario," explained the Honourable Lawrence MacAulay, the federal Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food. "Through this initiative, beekeepers will be able to access tools specific to their unique needs so they can continue building successful and sustainable beekeeping operations."

The new Honey Bee Health Initiative will help Ontario beekeepers maintain healthy honey bee colonies and will support them as they grow their number of colonies. Eligible activities also include equipment purchases or modifications of equipment that prevent the spread of disease and analysis work to support best management practices.

"Ontario beekeepers play an important role in honey production and maintaining healthy bee colonies, which in turn contributes to the pollination of Ontario crops," stated Lisa Thompson, the Minister of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA). "Our government is committed to working with our beekeepers to address sector challenges, explore new markets, and ensure the sector remains competitive."

The funding builds on previous programs, including the 2021 back-to-back Honey Bee Health Management Initiatives offered under the Canadian Agricultural Partnership (CAP). It also follows the recent commitment of $5 million through the AgriRecovery initiative, through Sustainable CAP, to help Ontario beekeepers offset extraordinary colony losses due to extreme weather conditions in 2021–22.

The initiative works via the Ontario Soil and Crop Improvement Association (OSCIA) and will contribute to the goals outlined in the Grow Ontario Strategy. The outcomes of this Initiative will contribute to increasing the amount of food grown and prepared in Ontario by 30 percent by 2032.

Sustainable CAP is a five-year (2023-2028) $3.5 billion investment by federal, provincial, and territorial governments to strengthen the competitiveness, innovation, and resiliency of the agriculture, agri‐food and agri-based product sectors. This includes $1 billion in federal programs and activities and a $2.5 billion commitment that is cost-shared 60 percent federally and 40 percent provincially and territorially for programs designed and delivered by the provinces and territories.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids