A parasite that could break commercial beekeeping is moving toward North America. Canada’s main line of defence is a certificate that cannot do the job.
Canada’s canola, blueberries, tree fruit and seed crops all depend on honey bee pollination. That work rests on a healthy beekeeping industry, and that industry is protected from a mite called Tropilaelaps by one thing: an exporting country tests its bees, does not find the mite, and certifies them clean. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency treats that certificate as proof the mite is absent. It is not. It means only that the mite was not found.
Tropilaelaps is a mite of honey bee brood, native to Asia. It is worse than Varroa, the parasite beekeepers already fight every year. It breeds faster, does more damage, and our bees have no natural defence against it. It is not in North America yet. But it is moving west: established in Russia since 2021, and confirmed in Georgia and Uzbekistan in 2024. Britain and Canada have already suspended bee imports from Ukraine because of it.
The weakness is the certificate itself. A country can honestly say it has not detected the mite while the mite is there. Three things make that gap real.
First, the tests do not work. The standard checks wash or shake adult bees, which works well for Varroa. But Tropilaelaps lives in the brood, not on the adults. A colony can be five percent infested and still pass. An honest, well-run inspection can find nothing and certify an infested apiary.
Second, the mite survives the trip. It lives longer on dead bees than live ones, and feeds on them. Every package of bees arrives with dead bees in the bottom of the box. In 2025 a broodless swarm was found on a ship bound for New Jersey still carrying 28 Tropilaelaps after weeks at sea. Transit is not a barrier.
Third, the history runs one way. Every major honey bee pest of the past forty years was found only after it had already settled in. Australia ran the best bee surveillance in the world and still caught Varroa too late to remove it. New Zealand did the same, and put the cost in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Once these mites establish, no country with both wild and managed bees has ever cleared them out.
There is a precedent for what does work. In 1922 the United States closed its border to live bee imports to keep another mite out. Sixty-two years passed before that mite turned up, and when it did it had walked overland from Mexico, not come through the certified trade. Closing the one route you can control buys time.
For Canada the cost of doing this is small. Beekeepers replace most of their winter losses themselves, by splitting their own hives. Bees brought in from outside North America are a small part of the supply. They are also the part that carries the risk.
So the ask is simple. Treat a certificate of “not detected” as what it is: a record that nobody found the mite, not proof it is not there. Reopen the import risk assessment. And pause live bee imports from outside North America until surveillance can actually find this mite before it arrives.
If Tropilaelaps establishes here, the review afterward will ask what we should have done. We already know the answer. The time to act is while the mite is still on the other side of the ocean.
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