Canadian beekeepers say businesses could fail as honey imports hit by U.S. tariffs

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Every summer, Canadian beekeepers install their hives across the Prairies, where their bees feast on fields of alfalfa, clover and canola. The climate tends not to produce the high winds or rain that keep the bees at home and the long northern days offer extra hours to a work force that labours from sunup to sundown.

It makes for a remarkable place to turn nectar into golden sweetness.

“Pounds per hive, Canada has some of the highest honey production in the world,” says Saskatchewan beekeeper Simon Lalonde.

But Canada’s beekeepers are now attempting to swallow sour news. The U.S. said this week it will impose a 50-per-cent tariff on imports of Canadian honey, one of hundreds of goods – from concrete to kraft paper to wigs to dead animals – caught up in what President Donald Trump‘s administration called retaliatory action against Canada.

If those tariffs come into place as promised on Aug. 19, beekeepers in Canada say honey prices could fall by 40 per cent. Some beekeeping businesses may fail.

“The whole industry is in an uproar over this,” said Peter Awram, who runs Worker Bee Honey Co., a family business in Rosedale, B.C., and Boyle, Alta. “It will be brutal.”

The honey industry has made for an unlikely stand-in for the broader trade relationship between Canada and the U.S. – an interdependent, collegial cross-border business in which both sides have worked alongside each other for decades with few grievances – only to see it threatened with grave disruption, for reasons people struggle to understand.

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Honey has not historically been a source of major trade frictions. Canada supplies just 2 per cent of the honey Americans consume, much of it industrial-grade product used in breakfast cereals and honey hams. The business of bees is also far from a one-way trade. Last year, the U.S. imported just over US$20-million in Canadian honey. But it sold to Canada nearly US$10-million in queen bees.

So in the U.S. “we don’t mind that you sell honey down to us,” Mr. Linder said. “That’s not a big deal.”

Just why honey might have been added to the tariff list is a question no one can confidently answer. Some of the U.S. new tariffs apply to symbolically Canadian goods such as hockey sticks. But they do not cover the country’s most famous sweetener: maple syrup.

Honey, by contrast, will be hit so hard that ”it would probably mean a total termination” of exports to the U.S., said Mr. Lalonde, who is president of the Saskatchewan Beekeepers Development Commission.

“I’m mad as hell about this,” he said. “They didn’t even ask us what we thought. They just threw us into the mix.”

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The honey tariffs will also hurt an area the U.S. seems to have sought to spare. Economists have calculated that the new tariffs will largely leave Alberta and Saskatchewan untouched. Honey is the exception. Those two provinces – along with Manitoba – produce the vast majority of Canadian honey. Forty per cent comes from Alberta alone.

Honey “just does not fit into a targeted area” for tariffs unless you’re trying to “raise the hackles” of premiers Danielle Smith, Scott Moe and Wab Kinew, Rod Scarlett, the executive director of the Canadian Honey Council, said.

Last year, Canadian beekeepers produced 84 million pounds of honey, a $240-million industry.

The U.S. currently buys roughly 15 per cent of Canadian product. Japan is the second-largest export market. Other international buyers take only small amounts.

Statistics Canada counts 16,360 beekeepers across the country; of those, roughly 500 maintain large commercial operations on the Prairies. Many are family-owned businesses that sell their products to co-operative-owned packers. Beekeepers estimate their hives support $7-billion in Canadian agriculture through pollination of blueberries, apples, cherries and hybrid canola seed.

In a statement, Saskatchewan Agriculture Minister David Marit warned that long-term imposition of the honey tariff could hurt “employment of seasonal workers, reduce investment and pause expansion plans.” The province will continue to advocate “to defend our exporters, protect jobs and make the case for open trade that benefits both countries,” he said.

Some say the tariff threat should prompt Canada to reverse a nearly 40-year ban on the import of U.S. packaged bees – bulk shipments used to stock hives. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) has cited pest risks from the U.S. bees, but beekeepers on both sides of the border have argued that it would be better to let them in.

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“We want Canada to quit importing bees from everywhere else. And we’d really like to close the continent to all bee imports,” said Mr. Linder, who is director for the BeeCAUSE Alliance, a political advocacy group. He is hopeful for a solution in which Canada amends its policy and the U.S. drops its honey tariffs.

The CFIA, however, reaffirmed its ban last year, saying it is acting to protect honey bees and not “the economic interests of stakeholders.”

Beekeeping is a cyclical business. Honey prices have been so low in recent years that many producers have operated in the red, waiting for another surge in prices.

This year looked like it would be better. Earlier this week, buyers in the U.S. the U.S. were citing a healthy increase in per-pound prices. Following the tariff announcement, those buyers have gone quiet and Canadian beekeepers are contemplating the possibility of another year that they end poorer than they began.

“It was a pretty good price,” Mr. Awram said.

After the tariff announcement, those buyers have gone quiet and Canadian beekeepers are contemplating the possibility of another year that they end poorer than they began.

The U.S. currently buys roughly 15 per cent of Canadian product. Japan is the second-largest export market. Other international buyers take only small amounts.

If exports to the U.S. are halted, “there’s a good chance of prices dropping 40 per cent, maybe more,” said Mr. Awram, who also serves on the board of the Canadian Beekeepers Federation.

“Nobody is happy right now.”

Losing sales could create larger problems, too. Beekeepers have two primary revenue streams: selling honey and pollinating fruit. If the honey side of the business is damaged, costs for pollination could rise. Fewer bees could be available, too, if beekeepers are forced out of business.

“Now those costs will be passed along to the fruit growers, who have to pass those costs to the buyers of the fruit,” Mr. Lalonde said.

“One small thing is going to start affecting an awful lot of different sectors.”