Beekeeping in Canada, 1924 to 2025

Canada has twice the beekeepers it had twenty years ago, and a third of what it had in 1945

The number of Canadian beekeepers bottomed out at 6,931 in 2008 and has climbed to 16,360 since. That is a real recovery, and it is also still only 38% of the 43,340 beekeepers Canada had in 1945, when wartime sugar rationing put a hive in a great many back gardens.

Colony numbers have moved far less than beekeeper numbers, which is the more interesting half. The growth is in small operations, not in hives: Canada gained roughly 8,389 beekeepers over those twenty years without a matching jump in colonies, so the average operation is getting smaller and there are many more people with a few hives than there used to be.

The last six years

Yield per colony is the volatile line, not price and not colony count. A bad summer costs Canadian beekeepers more than a bad market does.

2022 was the smallest Canadian harvest since 2009. 2023 was the largest in the table and 2024 the worst per colony, a swing of 30 pounds a hive in a single season.

Where the bees are

Canadian beekeeping is two different industries wearing one name. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba run large commercial operations on prairie canola: Alberta alone holds 38% of the country's colonies with 1,630 beekeepers. Ontario and British Columbia have the most beekeepers and far fewer hives each, which is what a hobbyist and sideliner base looks like.

Canadian beekeepers lost 39.3% of their colonies last winter

Against a long-run average of 28.4% across 19 winters since 2006-07. Winter loss is the number Canadian beekeepers actually argue about, and it swings harder than anything else here: the worst winter on record, 2021-22, took 45.5% of the country's colonies, and the best, 2011-12, took 15.3%. CAPA's preliminary figure for 2025-26 is 34%, which is provisional and gets revised in the final statement.

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 comparable to American or European loss surveys without checking each definition. CAPA publishes these only as annual PDFs; this series was digitised from them, and its long-run average reproduces the figure CAPA itself publishes.

What we can and cannot add to this

Everything above is Statistics Canada's work, not ours. Our own Canadian footprint is small enough to state in one sentence: 131 registered beekeepers as of 2026-08-26, which is under one percent of the 16,360 StatCan counts. We are not going to dress that up as a national dataset.

What our own reports can date, because it needs timing rather than volume, is the season. Canadian swarm reports peak in July, roughly six to eight weeks later than the American season, which is in our swarm season report. Province by province, including what each one requires of a registered beekeeper, is on beekeeping in Canada.