EDMONTON — Canada's honeybee population has been bruised and battered by a host of new health threats, so producers are looking to create a network of research and diagnostic efforts to protect their lucrative but fragile industry.

Much of the buzz at national meetings of the Canadian Honey Council and the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists this week in Calgary will be about how to convince different levels of government to help fund that network.

"If a beekeeper has a problem, they're on their own,'' says Heather Clay, national co-ordinator of the honey council.

"There are a few labs that do some tests, but there's nothing on a national basis that would be able to collect and communicate nationally with other labs to be able to determine that there is something that's more significant happening.''

Last year was hard on honeybees across North America.

Nearly 30 per cent of Canada's bee colonies were killed off last winter -- twice the normal rate. In the United States, a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder afflicted between 50 and 90 per cent of commercial colonies.

"Both of our countries experienced unprecedented losses in the last two years, and beekeepers and scientists who study bees are certainly gravely concerned about the health of bees throughout North America and the world,'' said Stephen Pernal, a national honeybee researcher who works out of Beaverlodge in northwestern Alberta.

One serious problem is that mites that carry different viruses have become resistant to the methods traditionally used to keep them in check, said Bill Currie, a professor of entomology at the University of Manitoba.

"They're basically acting like little hypodermic needles, injecting things into the bees that didn't used to be injected into them,'' he said. "And we know very little about those viruses.''

Many of the new strains of disease have morphed from existing forms, meaning they often can't be easily distinguished even by a trained scientist.

In order to track down what could have been affecting colonies last year, scientists here had to forward samples to labs in Sweden and the United States to help with more complex analysis, said Currie. Since those labs had their own priorities, it often took quite a while to get results, and not many samples could be sent.

And it's not just honey producers who are feeling the pinch, says Pernal, who is also head of the Canadian Association of Professional Apiculturists.

"It's also had quite an impact on agriculture, because there's such a dependence on managed pollinators like honeybees to pollinate quite a number of crops in Canada.''

Apples, cranberries, blueberries and raspberries are all pollinated by bees, as is the hybrid canola that's widely grown across Western Canada.

"In Canada, they contribute well over $1 billion to the agricultural economy every year,'' he said. "So they're important little guys, and not only for making honey.''

A diagnostic network could be the first step in a better warning system to detect problems and allow beekeepers to take action before their hives are affected, said Pernal. He said it may not cost a lot to get the infrastructure in place for such a network, but researchers would be needed to collect and analyze the information.

"We can tolerate heavy losses, perhaps, in a single year. But if the industry is going to suffer those losses for two or three years running, it will effectively break the back of the beekeeping industry,'' he said.

"So we're under quite a lot of pressure to look at some of the threats to honeybee health, identify new threats, and one thing we think would be valuable would be to put a good diagnostic network into place.''

Some individual provinces, such as Ontario, have very good monitoring, while the Eastern provinces have very little, he said.

The concept of a national network has been discussed with different levels of government, and "they're sympathetic to the idea. I think they're looking for a solid plan,'' said Clay, adding the groups hope to have a plan by the end of this week's meeting.

The United States government has recently dedicated $75 million for honeybee research, said Clay, and part of it is expected to go towards a diagnostic service.

"We don't expect to see the figures they're getting because they have 10 times our population. But even if we could get 10 per cent of what they're putting into it,'' she said. "They value their pollination and their agriculture. We have to do the same.''