Beekeeping in British Columbia

Registering as a beekeeper in British Columbia

Beekeeping registration in Canada is provincial, not federal, and the rules differ enough between provinces that advice written for one is usually wrong for the next. In British Columbia the instrument is the Bee Regulation (B.C. Reg. 3/2015) under the Animal Health Act, which replaced the repealed Bee Act in January 2015, administered by the Apiculture program at the BC Ministry of Agriculture, under the Provincial Apiculturist.

Anyone keeping bees in British Columbia must be registered, and it is a separate legislated requirement to register each apiary location.

What else British Columbia asks of you

• Registration runs through the province's Premises Identification system rather than a standalone beekeeping form, so each apiary site is tied to a premises ID.
• Reportable and notifiable bee diseases are set out in the Reportable and Notifiable Disease Regulation, separate from the Bee Regulation itself.
• Apiculture inspectors are available by region and will arrange site inspections on request.

Source: gov.bc.ca apiculture. Rules change, and this page is a starting point rather than legal advice. Check the source before you rely on it.

British Columbia beekeeping associations and swarm lists

Swarm collection in Canada mostly runs through provincial and regional associations, the same way it does in the United States. If you want swarm calls the traditional way, these are the people who keep the lists.

• British Columbia Honey Producers' Association

  Provincial body, with regional clubs affiliated under it across the Lower Mainland, the Island and the interior.

  bchoneyproducers.ca

When British Columbia swarms

The south coast runs early by Canadian standards. Our own British Columbia reports start in April and stay steady from May through August, which is a longer and flatter season than the sharp July peak the rest of the country shows. The interior and the north run several weeks behind the coast, so a single provincial date is not much use here.

The national picture is in our swarm season report, and if you are not certain what you are looking at, the swarm identification guide covers the difference between a swarm of bees, an established nest, and wasps.

Beekeeping in British Columbia by the numbers

These are Statistics Canada's figures for 2025, not ours. They cover every registered beekeeper in the province rather than the ones who happen to use Swarmed, which makes them the honest measure of how big beekeeping in British Columbia actually is.

That is 10.3% of Canada's colonies and 4.7% of its honey by weight, at an average of 45 lb per colony and $5.96 a pound.

Set against that, 31 British Columbia beekeepers are registered with us, or about 0.6% of the province's beekeepers. The two counts are defined differently, since Statistics Canada surveys registered operators and ours is simply whoever signed up, so read it as a rough sense of how thin our coverage is rather than a market share.

Source: Statistics Canada table 32-10-0353-01, production and value of honey, released 2026-04-29. Figures are in Canadian dollars. Yield and price are derived from the production, value and colony series rather than taken from StatCan's own yield column, which the agency has retired. The whole national series, back to 1924, is on our Canadian beekeeping data page.

What British Columbia lost last winter

British Columbia beekeepers lost 42.6% of their colonies over the 2024-25 winter, against a national long-run average of 28.4% across 19 winters. That is 14.2 points worse than the long-run average.

Nationally the 2024-25 winter cost 39.3%. The worst year on record is 2021-22 at 45.5% and the best is 2011-12 at 15.3%, so a single figure hides a lot: Canadian winters vary more than any other input a beekeeper here plans around.

Source: Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists (CAPA), annual statement on honey bee wintering losses in canada. The measure is winter loss including non-viable colonies, which is not the same as colonies that died, and is not directly comparable to American or European loss surveys. Digitised from CAPA's annual PDFs, which are the only form this data is published in.

What we see in British Columbia

British Columbia is the other province where Swarmed already works the way it is meant to, and the Lower Mainland is where most of that happens.

Read from our own reports on 2026-08-26, out of 91 across Canada. Reports and swarms are counted separately on purpose: 17 of British Columbia's 23 were established colonies inside a structure rather than a cluster in the open, which is a different job and often a paid one. These are small numbers and we would rather say so than dress them up.

Getting swarm calls without a swarm list

A traditional swarm list is a page of phone numbers that someone updates when they remember to. Swarmed sends every beekeeper within range the same report the moment it arrives, free, and the first to claim it gets it. There is no membership, no association to join, and no waiting for your turn on a rota.

It also does not replace your association. If you are already on a club list in British Columbia, being on both simply means fewer colonies get sprayed.