Apimondia is the bi-annual international bee festival. Two years ago, it was hosted by Turkey; two years from now, it will be in Russia. This year? Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
There are a lot of reasons to visit Montreal. The Notre-Dame Basilica and 21,000-species of plants in Montreal’s botanical gardens come to mind. If island living is not for you (Montreal is on an island), Apimondia’s organizers have tours that will take you away. You can see what’s available at this site. But with 350 oral presentations, 566 posters, and thousands of feet of exhibits and vendors, sight-seeing might not fit your schedule. You can find the complete program guide (a 117-page book) on line, here.
If you have time, drop by and see me present a talk about foraging distances of leafcutters, honey bees, and bumble bees (Foraging distances of commercially-deployed bees: A meta-analysis; 1:45pm, Thursday, September 12, Room 517B) or see my poster (“Who becomes an urban beekeeper?”), which is formally titled Demographic and socio-economic influences of urban beekeeping. It will be up all day on Tuesday, September 10 – look for poster P.07.143.
See you at Apimondia 2019!
Bad Beekeeping Blog 
I am looking forward to meeting you, Ron, and to your sessions.
Regards, and safe travels,
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Ron, I hope you have a wonderful time in Montreal. I was born and raised in the Montreal area, and started beekeeping there in the mid 1970s. I now keep bees on Vancouver Island.
I have been meaning to ask you if deformed wing virus in bumblebees has ever been reported for Vancouver Island or elsewhere in British Columbia. On July 11, 2019 I found a bumblebee crawling on the driveway with only stubs for wings. The wings were deformed and not merely worn from too much use. In 2017, I had high varroa mite loads in my honeybees and several honeybees had DWV. I am now concerned that DWV spread from my honeybees to the local bumblebee population.
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Thanks, I landed in Montreal early this morning and have had a bit of a look around the beautiful old downtown. So much history, expansive churches, and interesting architecture.
It’s impossible to know whether your own bees have transferred Deformed Wing Virus to a bumble bee. There are thousands of colonies of honey bees on Vancouver Island, so it may have been anyone’s bees. I haven’t heard of DWV on the island, but that’s not something which I’ve been following. Others may have recorded it already.
For at least 15 years, we have known that the virus can jump from honey bee to bumble bee. Here’s a link to a 2005 paper:
http://www.dargbees.org.uk/Bumble%20bees%20and%20DWV.pdf
The authors noted that “All bumble bees (B. terrestris and B. pascuorum) exhibiting deformed wings tested positive [via PCR-sequencing]for DWV-RNA” in bees that they studied. Another article, from Science is here: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/02/deadly-virus-widespread-british-bumblebees.
It was quite astute that you noticed the deformed bumble bee and linked it to DWV. Did you, by any chance, collect the bee? Did you get any photos?
I’ll ask around and see if I learn anything more.
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Ron, thank you for the references on DWV. After feeding the bumblebee some honey and taking photographs, I froze the bee. I still have it. I am willing to ship it to you or anyone else you know that could make use of it.
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Thanks. I’ll see if we can find someone interested in this.
Ron
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Hi, it’s been a year, but I know where we should take your frozen DWV bumble bee. Do you still have it? Thanks!
Ron
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