The Alberta government is taking steps to stop the threat of the mountain pine beetle in the province’s forests, and crews have been dispatched to the Hinton area to clean up and burn beetle-infested trees before the pest hatches this spring. 

Duncan MacDonnell, public affairs officer with Alberta Sustainable Resource Development, said there are 600 people on the ground, including 40 in the Hinton area. The crews are spread from the Grand Prairie area, where most of the work is being done, to Fox Creek and Hinton, the Willmore Wilderness Area and the Smokey region. 

The infested trees are being cut up and burned. MacDonnell said the trees are being destroyed, as they are unable to be harvested. 

“They’re strictly doing cut and burn,” he said. 

The government of Alberta has been doing pine beetle forestry work since 2006, when the infestation moved from B.C. over to Alberta. The infestation is never static each year, and the worst could be still to come for Alberta. 

“It’s year to year,” MacDonnell said. “We’re living under threat of additional in-flights from B.C.”

In B.C., forestry crews measure the forest loss by hectares, but MacDonnell said Alberta is nowhere near close to that level of destruction yet. Crews in this province continue to count loss by the number of affected trees. 

“We don’t have that horizon to horizon dead red,” MacDonnell said. 

The government of Alberta has contributed $15 million for the project, with an additional $15 million to total $30 million for disaster assistance to combat the beetle. At the end of the contract, 170,000 trees are expected to be removed in the region between Grand Prairie and Hinton. 

B.C. is now 15 years into the infestation that has wiped out 675 million cubic metres of timber, and has affected a further 16.3 million hectares – which is an area about five times the size of Vancouver Island, or 15 million logging truck loads according to the B.C. Ministry of Forests, Mines and Lands. In Alberta, about six million hectares of forest are threatened, according to Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. 

The trees affected are old growth lodgepole pine. The trees become red within a year after becoming infested, and eventually turn grey and drop their needles over a period of about two to four years. The infestation peaked in 2005 and has been slowing in recent years. The area the beetle has spread to includes Fort St. John in the north, the Alberta border in the east, Terrace to the west and the U.S. border to the south. 

Because of the improvements in wildfire management, the age of lodgepole pine has gone up significantly over the last 90 years, which provided a large mature forest for the beetle to infect. Hot and dry summers are a great environment for the beetle as well. 

Cold weather has been proven to kill the beetle’s eggs, pupae and young larvae, but temperatures must stay consistently below -35 C or -40 C for a few days straight for large populations of the beetle to be killed. Cold snaps in the early fall can be lethal to the beetle, which builds up a natural anti-freeze over time. Cold snaps that occur before the first snow fall are the most affective, as the pine beetles are better insulated towards the bottom of the trunk if there is snow on the ground. Wind chill can affect the beetle, but is usually not sustained long enough to cause death. 

The average life span of a pine beetle is about one year. The larvae spend the winter underneath the bark of a pine and feed into the spring, transforming into pupae in June and July. The adult beetles vacate the tree throughout the summer and into the early fall. The beetle stains the tree’s sapwood blue by transmission of a fungus. After studies, it has been revealed that the blue sap does not have any effect on the wood’s strength properties, and wood can still be harvested for high-quality goods – in fact the blue-stained wood products have created a unique niche for woodworking and other beetle-kill products. The wood is called “denim pine”. The Vancouver Olympic Speed Skating Oval was built using pine beetle kill. The wood can still be harvested sometimes up to 18 years after the tree has been killed, but standing dead timber can pose a risk of forest fires. 

The tree is killed after the adult beetles lay their eggs beneath the bark. The eggs hatch, and the larvae burrow into the tree’s phloem area and cut off the tree’s supply to nutrients. The fungus that turns the sap blue dehydrates the tree and stops the tree from defending itself against the beetle’s attacks. 

Thea Mitchell, public relations and communications for Parks Canada says that the Jasper National Park has had pine beetle work done in the past, but nothing is planned for this year as the park has very little pine beetle infestation compared to the rest of the province.