While bee colonies across the Atlantic are mysteriously vanishing, beekeeping here is on the increase - in the pursuit of pure honey, writes Renagh Holohan
Instead of election candidate posters festooning the county one Saturday last month, a back road in Kildare displayed placards with the image of a big bee. It wasn't the symbol of an environment candidate, but marked the entrance to a large garden and apiary where members of the North Kildare Beekeepers Association (NKBKA) were gathering for their annual open day.
Some 20 amateur beekeepers, or would-be beekeepers, turned up, the oldest an octogenarian and the youngest only 13 years. Some have yet to set up their own hives, others have just a couple. Others, unlike the open day's host Patrick Mercer of Clane, who keeps 30 hives between Kildare and the banks of the Shannon in Roscommon, have only a couple. For all of them it is a hobby, not a business. The honey they produce is for family, friends and occasionally for sale at farmers' markets and their product is much sought after. Beekeeping is an increasingly trendy activity.
While many beekeepers are following a family tradition going back several generations, others are starting from scratch and there is a growing demand for knowledge. The NKBKA gives regular lectures, where chairman Colm O'Neill of Naas, among others, imparts what he gleaned from his father.
The open day starts with the participants getting kitted out in white bee suits, veiled hats, long gloves and big boots. Bees can be aggressive when disturbed and a bee sting, or several (for, once stung, other bees are then attracted to attack the victim), is no laughing matter for the beginner.
Old hands such as Mercer and O'Neill frequently go gloveless for better dexterity. They get stung, of course, but say it doesn't bother them.
The members then troop down to the apiary, looking not unlike a posse from the Ku Klux Klan, carrying smoking cans, a mechanism for calming bees. One wears a red suit, an innovation, because, apparently, bees cannot see the colour red.
The mild winter and exceptional April heatwave mean the hives are full, but Mercer leaves this honey, mostly gathered from ivy, for the bees themselves and waits until late August or early September to extract the more palatable summer honey. Ten hives will yield, in a good season, about 600lbs annually.
Today the group splits in three and under an experienced beekeeper, they open the hives. All the bees' activity is there to see. There are nursery bees, who feed and clean the cells, wax builders, scouts, who, on return perform an elaborate dance giving the location of the best nectar, foragers, guards who patrol the entrance, and drones, or male bees, who do very little indeed. It's a whole production line and the workers are such busy bees they drop dead from overwork after about six weeks.
The first job is to locate the queen, which has been colour-marked a couple of weeks earlier for ease of spotting and has had her wings clipped (the most delicate operation of all and only for the steady of hand), to prevent her leading a swarm. Then the frames are examined, moved around and searched for queen cells or absence thereof.
VERY GOOD HIVES, housing up to 30,000 busy bees, a good queen, who is laying eggs from which even more bees, workers and drones will emerge and producing plenty of honey, or too much for the space, will be split in two. This is delicate and precise work; the queen has to be located and moved on her frame to a new empty hive.
Some frames, with thousands of bees upon them, are moved in with her. It is hoped she is thus fooled into believing they have swarmed and won't follow her instinct and leave the hive to form a new colony - the way bees have propagated since the beginning of time.
On the frames left behind, one queen cell is selected for breeding a new queen and the others are destroyed. There can be only one queen in a hive. Otherwise, one swarms with half the colony - taking half the honey with them. These are then lost to the beekeeper and neighbours are not best pleased when the bees gather in a nook in their roof.
A week later, the hives will be opened again to see if all is well and to look for signs of further swarming which beekeepers dread. This season everything is early, so more and more supers were put on top of the hives. Supers (boxes containing more frames) provide extra space for honey when the original hive is full. Some hives in Clane had three supers by early May, - something which hadn't happened in years. But then, the beekeepers said, you only had to look at the early and abundant hawthorn in the hedges to know it would be so.
May to early September, when the honey is extracted, is the busy time for beekeepers. In winter, when all the drones, or male bees whose only function is for a few of them to fertilise the queen, are expelled by the worker bees, the hive sort of goes to sleep. Since the beekeeper has "stolen" all the honey they have hoarded to see them through the winter, a special sugary substance is fed to the bees so they won't starve.
It is said that bees work according to rule - but this is not always so. Strange things happen and they must be watched. The Federation of Irish Beekeeping Associations has alerted members to the alarming incidence of colony collapse in the United States and now in the UK (see Another Life, below). In many cases colonies have inexplicably vanished.
COLM O'NEILL TELLS the group that most such occurrences relate to bees used for mass pollination in the US. The hives, by the thousand, are leased to fruit farmers and the business is so lucrative, he says, that the beekeepers, who travel the country in huge trucks, don't even bother removing the honey from the hives.
Now these bees are disappearing in their millions. No explanation can be found. Some blame the effects of phone masts and other electronic signals, although two masts near the Clane apiary have not interfered with the local bees. Others, and O'Neill thinks this may be more likely, believe pesticides and chemicals sprayed on crops may be a factor. No one knows. There have been no reports of colony collapse in Ireland to date.
The mysterious threat comes just as many beekeepers are recovering from the loss of colonies to the varroa mite. It is thought this pest arrived in Ireland when someone, despite a ban on importing bees, brought bees from England to the north west. It spread very quickly through most parts of the country, wiping out many colonies and creating a shortage which still exists. Wild, that is feral, bees have largely died out and those in apiaries are living with the mite thanks to special control measures.
So why do more and more people want to keep bees? It's not as easy as it looks and many fail in their attempts. But it is the oldest food known to man and is both sweet and nutritious. Much shop-bought honey is either entirely imported or blended with imported honey. While organic honey is almost illusive, in that you can't control where the bees gather the pollen and nectar, your own hives are the nearest thing to purity. There is huge demand for pure Irish honey from a named beekeeper, and the demand for sections or honeycombs, as opposed to jars, which the beekeepers enter in the shows, is even greater.
In England, and increasingly here, it is becoming highly fashionable to keep bees. Fortnum & Mason, the chic London-based provider of upmarket foods, announced recently that it is planning to put several hives on its roof. The bees will collect from the city's gardens and no doubt even from nearby Buckingham Palace. Hives in London's roof gardens are not unknown, but country beekeepers here wonder how the keeper will manage if they swarm and what will happen if the neighbours are stung.
O'Neill told the NKBKA that there are more honey bees in 2007 than in many a year and more people trying to get into bees. Six to eight hives, he said, provide the best return. Two is the minimum number, in case something goes wrong in one.
And what did the 13-year-old think of it all? Aoife Breen, from Naas, who came to the open day with her father, said: "It's really interesting to see how it works and stuff, and that the bees know what they have to do."
In a lifetime, you could still be learning about bees.
See www.irishbeekeeping.ie