EDUCATION
CURRENTLY WE OFFER A TWO YEAR DIPLOMA IN APICULTURE
The main aim of this course is to provide quality third level education on bees and beekeeping. This course may be of interest primarily to beekeepers or those considering becoming a beekeeper. It will also be of interest to anyone who has an interest in entomology, pollinators, the decline of bees and pollinators more generally.
WE'VE GIVEN TALKS OVER THE YEARS!
Please watch and enjoy some of our content
In the near future we will be setting up our own YouTube channel to upload some of the content we teach on the Diploma!
Chiara Binetti SICAMM Searching for Wild Honeybees in Woodlands of Ireland
Despite the relatively low forest cover in Ireland, some ancient and long-established woodlands are still present and considered to be of high conservation value. This presentation illustrates the developed methodology for searching for free-living honeybee colonies in woodlands, including giving the details of its first applications in Ireland.
Alexandra Valentine 18th COLOSS Conference (2022 eEonference) Rapid Presentation
18th COLOSS Conference Rapid Presentation focusing on the introduction of SFI-funded PhD project titled “The evolution and adaptation of free-living Apis mellifera mellifera across the island of Ireland.
Alexandra Valentine | Characterisation of Irish free-living honeybee using DeepWings©
Morphometrics has been widely used in the study of honeybees since its development in the late 20th century. The original 26 subspecies of Western honeybees (Apis mellifera sp.) were characterised using a suite of 36 morphological characteristics by Fredrich Ruttner in 1988 and included the analysis of 11 angles of forewing venation and abdominal discolouration (banding) (Ruttner, 1988). However, with the development of molecular methods providing a more robust and accurate identification, morphometrics is often perceived as a redundant and outdated method. DeepWings is a free, open-source software developed in 2022 (Rodrigues et al., 2022) and has revolutionised the process of wing geometric morphometrics (WGM) to identify Western honeybee subspecies.
Stephen Smith | IPRN Talk Using Genomics to aid the Conservation of the Native Irish Honey Bee
Methods to detect hybridised honeybee colonies in Ireland using colony level pool-seq data.