— December 2, 2025
Four major North American beekeeping organizations released the first-ever North American Bee Strategy this week, a coordinated, continent-wide plan to protect honey bees, strengthen the viability of professional beekeeping, and safeguard food security across the United States and Canada.
The strategy is the result of a cross-border collaboration between the American Beekeeping Federation, the American Honey Producers Association, the Canadian Beekeepers Federation, and the Canadian Honey Council. The collaboration was convened by the Keystone Policy Center, which facilitates the Honey Bee Health Coalition.
The North American Bee Strategy (NABS) lays out coordinated, actionable priorities to:
- Improve monitoring, treatment, and research on pests and diseases, including varroa and the emerging threat of Tropilaelaps.
- Strengthen honey authenticity standards and enforcement to curb fraudulent imports.
- Support applied research, shared research infrastructure, and streamlined scientific collaboration.
- Build a more unified and sustainable honey market across national borders.
The Strategy offers recommendations that are grounded in science, shaped by the experience of working commercial beekeepers, and focused on real-world solutions that can be swiftly implemented. Key recommendations from the strategy include:
- Varroa Management: Development of new treatments, updated thresholds, and streamlined U.S.–Canada regulatory approval for new control tools.
- Tropilaelaps Preparedness: Immediate tightening of import controls, unified federal response plans, sentinel hive monitoring networks, and early detection systems before the pest arrives in North America.
- Honey Authenticity Protections:
- Creation of “standards of identity” for honey, similar to wine appellations
- Stronger enforcement to ensure adulterated honey does not reenter the market
- Development of a continental honey authenticity database and voluntary certification system
- Applied Research Infrastructure:
- Standardized research proposal formats
- A centralized repository for results
- Best-practice research protocols to support comparability and collaboratioN
The Strategy will be updated annually as science evolves and conditions change.
