The Comox Valley Beekeepers Association recognized that common agricultural practices, such as pesticide use, tilling, weed removal and planting monocultures, harm bees. Since bee health is crucial for agriculture, our farming systems must better support the bees that pollinate our food. Currently, there is no baseline data on the bee species in Vancouver Island’s agricultural systems, meaning declines in bee populations may go unnoticed, potentially leading to the loss of critical species like the western bumblebee.
To address this, the Comox Valley Beekeepers Association supported the Bees in Vancouver Island Agriculture Project to help create a checklist of bee species in Vancouver Island’s agricultural systems. With the help of the Bee BC Program and other funders the project cataloged 60 bee species found in Vancouver Island agriculture. This data was compiled into a project report and shared with the BC Conservation Data Centre, helping identify areas where these species can be better supported. The project also focused on knowledge-sharing and education, offering a 20-participant on-farm workshop and a 100-participant Zoom workshop that distributed the checklist and provided measures farms can implement to protect the health of vulnerable bee species in the region.
“The support of the Bee BC Program and The Comox Valley Beekeepers Association were integral to bring this multi-year project to completion! It was so exciting to see the high diversity of species on our farms, each contributing to pollination in their own way. I really hope that this project has changed the way Vancouver Island farmers think about their pollinators and that the data will be used going forward to continue to support both managed and unmanaged bees in our agriculture systems.”
