Beekeepers and prospective beekeepers in Kenora now have a hive to go to.

Vicky Donatch, who has been beekeeping for four years and moved to Kenora more than a year ago from Alliston, Ont. decided there needed to be a place where people could learn about beekeeping.

“Being from southern Ontario there was just more access to bees and the knowledge of bees,” she said. “But in Kenora I found that there wasn’t a place where people could go and seek out knowledge or to learn more.”

Donatch got her start beekeeping after her mother’s plum tree wasn’t doing very well.

“My mom had plum trees for like 10 years and never got any plums,” she said. “She was watching the news one day and it said that bees were dying out and people were doing the pollinating themselves so we took the flowers from one tree and put it on another and we had hundreds of plums that year.”

Donatch said she and her mother thought it was crazy they had to pollinate their own plum tree, and went to take a beekeeping course in Cookstown, Ont. They loved it so much they decided to start keeping bees.

“One year we had four hives and we never had to pollinate the plum tree again,” Donatch said with a laugh.

As of 2016, there are 2,896 beekeepers in Ontario, which is 29 per cent of all beekeepers in Canada. There are more than 97,000 bee colonies in the province, which is a decline from the more than 100,000 colonies in 2015.

Donatch hopes the Kenora beekeeping club will one day have its own hive for volunteers and others interested in beekeeping to help maintain. The Kenora beekeeping club will also be a nucleus of information on bees, as well as a chance to have school groups come out and show students about beekeeping.

“Bees are so interesting and so important we want people to know, especially the younger generation, to learn more about the importance because they don’t just make honey,” Donatch said.

Bees play an important role in the agriculture industry by pollinating certain flowers and crops, which need bees to help reproduce. If bees ceased to exist, foods like broccoli, pumpkins, watermelons and apples would no longer be available. There would be no honey, and the average Canadian consumes 0.91 kilograms a year according to Statistics Canada.

“Imagine if farms, who are big producers of the food that we eat in grocery stores, if their product is not being pollinated what will we eat,” Donatch said.

To learn more, or to join the beekeeping club you can find them on Facebook at Kenora Beekeeper’s Club or by emailing Vicky Donatch at kenorabeekeepingclub@gmail.com.

rstelter@postmedia.com