Beekeeping in Canada: Trends of Self-Sufficiency and Participation in the Global Honey Bee Trade
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian beekeeping industry relies on external sources of honey bees to maintain current populations, however the outstanding benefits of locally-raised bees is widely acknowledged. Wellestablished Canadian beekeeping regimes, with geographically specific sets of productive and organizational patterns, have been slow to increase domestic self-sufficiency. Common explanations for this focus on environmental constraints of Canada's northern locations that prohibit economically feasible self-sufficient commercial beekeeping. However, this study shows that rather than only environmental, biologic, and economic constraints to beekeeper self-sufficiency there are also significant social barriers deeply entrenched in beekeeping cultures. This study highlights, in particular, how the politics of hive management are shaped by choices of participating in the global bee trade or beekeeping with rootedness in time and place. I explore historical legacies of the social networks and institutions that help develop and promote beekeeping ideologies. Regional and national beekeeping networks and institutions have been key to building the industry and (re)developing the required local knowledge for self-sufficient regimes. Positive impacts of beekeeper self-sufficiency include; creating deeper ecological connections, deepening bee and local knowledge, minimizing vulnerabilities inherent in the global lively commodity market, and potential roles in national biosecurity strategies and challenging the structure of our current agri-food systems. In rural economies and an era of climate change, re-imagining democratic economies and embracing the potential to reshape beekeeping cultures and industry in socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable ways is crucial. Aside from focus on resilient socio-ecological beekeeping regimes this study points to opportunities to radically change the way we keep bees that favour bee health and beekeeper knowledge.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".