Apiary

Our work has been in partnership with the Native Irish Honey bee Society (NIHBS) and more recently FIBKA and many members of the IBA. Pat Deasy and Mark Newenham generously gave us some colonies of their native bees which they had not treating for Varroa. Gerard Coyne and Sean Osborne gave us lots of beekeeping advice and assistance coming to inspect our colonies from time to time.

Since 2018 we have maintained between 10 and 20 colonies derived from nucs originating from Wexford (Tom Doyle), Galway (Sean Osborne), and swarmed bees. We do not treat our bees with chemicals but prefer to go down the minimally managed route. That said we do open them more frequently than might be expected because we manage swarming and the hives are used for research.

We are generous with the amount of honey we leave them for winter since they collected it in the first place and we don’t believe in replacing any feed with sugar water as it doesn’t contain the plant nutrients that they collected in nectar. Going into the 2021 season we had 12 colonies. That summer, one colony was unable to raise a successful queen after we split the colony. The colony had significant chalkbrood which, combined with Varroa, made the colony less fit and so we let it die out.  A second colony initially underwent successful supercedure however the queen didn’t mate successfully and the colony dwindled. We had bred a daughter from this colony but sadly the daughter was not successful either and so we lost that lineage. Other lineages remain and in 2022 we increased the number of colonies to 20 by making some splits and including swarms.

We hope to be able to use the apiary to further understand and apply a natural/Darwinian approach to beekeeping allowing bees in our apiary to develop traits that both aid their survival in the presence of parasites like Varroa but also to have other traits of interest to beekeepers.