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Okotoks apiary seeks help to rebuild hives

Annanie Sherwood, co-owner of Forever Bee, has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help rebuild 27 beehives that were devastated by bear attacks in October followed by a cold and long winter.
Bee Hives
Annanie Sherwood, co-owner of Forever Bee, has launched a GoFundMe campaign to help rebuild 27 beehives that were devastated by bear attacks in October followed by a cold and long winter.

Okotoks-based bee farmers have been overwhelmed by the response to a GoFundMe campaign to help rebuild their hives.

“I just can’t believe it,” said Annanie Sherwood, co-owner of Forever Bee.

She and her husband Matt run the small apiary that raises bees to help organic farms across southern Alberta with pollination, and creates items like candles, skin products, and flavoured honey.

They lost 75 per cent of their 32 hives, located near Granary Road in Foothills County, this winter due to extreme temperatures after two bear attacks in October.

“I guess they were getting ready for winter, the bears,” said Sherwood. “We picked everything up and tried to pull all the bees we could find out of the snow, just put them back into the hives.”

They picked up the bees, trying to warm them in their hands as they placed them into the hive boxes, put honey frames back in, and tried to rebuild and patch the destroyed boxes as best they could to protect their bees over the winter.

Not wanting to cause harm to the bears but keen to protect their fragile boxes from further damage, they erected electric fencing around the hives to deter but not hurt the animals.

Then they had to wait until April to check on the hives.

“When we went to go check on them to see how many survived and how the hives looked, we found that they all had died,” said Sherwood. “We had some really harsh, the arctic cold front that came in, usually you can expect some losses during the winter but 75 per cent is huge.”

The loss was to their honeycomb hives, which she said were their strongest before the bear attacks.

“Usually you use your strongest hives for your honeycomb hives because they have to rebuild the honeycomb every single frame,” said Sherwood.

It will cost about $10,000 to replace the bees from the 27 damaged hives, and that is the goal for the GoFundMe campaign. As of 3 p.m. on May 4 a total of $9,700 had been raised since the fundraiser went live April 30.

The cost of each hive is about $1,000 including all the materials for the hive boxes as well as the bees, said Sherwood.

In an ordinary year, the loss could have been recovered over the spring and summer with markets and other events that allow for the sale of product, but with those cancelled Forever Bee opted to turn to the community for help.

“The $10,000 will be to replace our bees,” she said. “That is number one for us, if we can just replace our bees.”

Starting a hive begins with a nuke, a box with five honey frames, a queen, and three pounds of bees. With lockdowns and border closures, importing the starter boxes is difficult.

They searched locally and someone was willing to help get them back on their feet.

“We found a farmer that is willing to sell us some nukes,” said Sherwood. “That’s really great, because they’re so hard to come by.”

Now they have a short timeframe to get the hive boxes up and running, ready for pollination and honey production this summer.

The organic farms they supply with bees are beginning to sow their seeds, so the clock is ticking, she said. They rely on bees to help pollinate their crops, which increases their yields by as much as 60 per cent.

Forever Bee provides the hives to farmers free-of-charge, where bees feed off pesticide-free crops. The company then makes honey and other products from the hive yields.

“It’s a win-win-win,” said Sherwood. “But if we can’t get our bees out to pollinate, those farmers are going to have a hard time getting 60 per cent of their crop yield, and we don’t have a honey harvest for the season.”

With the race on to get the boxes into the field, Sherwood said she launched the GoFundMe campaign on April 30, thinking they might be near their goal by the end of May if they were lucky.

The response blew her away.

“I’m just so floored,” said Sherwood. “It’s been amazing.”

For more information or to donate to the campaign visit http://foreverbee.ca or GoFundMe.

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