Bee-Kept (2025)

[bunniefuu]

Swarming, buzzing, building.

These social animals can be spotted

around Ireland's fields, woodlands,

and houses, and are most active in

the summer months.

Hard working, helpful, and

honey-minded, they are beekeepers.

I wake up with cramps in my legs,

sometimes thinking,

stretching the leg and wonder,

Is that my corbicula?

That is the pollen basket on bee's

leg.

I'm thinking, Oh my God, you've

become a bee.

I really think it's a lot to do with

the noise.

Whatever the noise does to me, it

makes me...

It just relaxes me.

As soon as I hear it, I just feel...

(Sighs) Yeah.

The number one I'd say for me in

terms

of my work as a beekeeper

is seeing the queen.

They're quite hard to spot.

They're quite hard to spot.

So when you see one, it's a real

treat.

I have her. I have her.

A pure black Irish queen.

I have to try and get her into this.

I like everything about beekeeping,

I suppose, really,

from start to finish.

I mean, it's an ancient craft, do

you know?

They come in all types: carpenters,

gardeners, scientists, but they

all have one thing in common.

They are absolutely obsessed with

honeybees.

(Birdsong)

(Buoyant music)

Just like bees, beekeepers are

experts

in building homes in any tiny gap

they can find.

Here in the heart of the Liberties

in Dublin 8,

Anthony Freeman O'Brien tends

a little corner of heaven.

When people walk past and the gate

is open,

it's like the secret garden.

No one really knows it's

here until you look in.

People in the area know it's here,

but people visiting the area,

they walked past, they wouldn't have

a clue.

No one had ever noticed it was here

until you actually

got past the gates.

This area we're in now is called the

Leo Freeman Meadow.

It's our Bee 8 Mindfulness Garden.

We were given it originally just

to start two hives here,

and then it was a real overgrown

space.

It was full of drug needles and beer

cans and stuff like that.

So I just started to clean it out

and I turned it into a garden then,

and that's I painted everything and

I sculpted everything and

just turned it into our mindfulness

garden.

And we bring people in here because

it's a safe space.

We can close the gates behind us.

So we bring a lot of kids in here

and we put bee suits on them

and teach them about the bees

and those other groups as well.

We leave the gate open some days

and people just pop their heads in

and we give a little conversations.

It's a real peaceful space.

It's like the city just vanishes in

when you're in here.

It's a real, it's a real...

It's probably one of the best parts

of the project.

(Tranquil music)

(Buzzing)

Being a beekeeper has affected me

massively.

It's made me a real calm person.

I'd have a short fuse years ago,

but the bees have sort of, and

still,

just getting rid of that.

I really think it's a lot

to do with the noise.

Whatever the noise does

to me, it makes me...

It just relaxes me.

Then as soon as I hear it, (Sighs).

I just feel, yeah, I'm just calm.

But it took It took me a year to

feel that way.

When I first started, I felt like I

owe the person who introduced me.

I owe her a lot.

She was at the end, stuff for me to

make me life,

to turn me life around.

So I felt like I owe her.

So that's why I actually started

down beekeeping.

But It took me a good year to get

over with me fear of them.

I was terrified, terrified at the

start.

I had that real inner city view of,

there's something hiding

in the dark all the time in nature.

Whereas now, I just love it.

I love being around them.

I wanted to... everything I know

about plants

or I know about nature now is just

basically for the bees.

I've never had interest in

gardening, but now I do,

and it's just because of the bees.

I don't really care about the

flowers themselves.

I just care about what they are to

the bees.

(Droning music)

It's early summer in Mullingar,

and today, under the watchful eye

of Ken Norton,

a new class of aspiring bee keepers

are visiting their association apiary

for the first time.

After a winter of classes, these

newbies have finished their exams

and are ready to meet thousands of

new friends.

Well, basically what we were doing

was we've had a lot of new people

on, I don't like to call them

beginner's courses,

because even if you're keeping bees

200 years, to me,

you're still a beginner.

So we like to call them newcomers.

So basically what we were doing

after the seven weeks we spent

with them one night a week indoors,

we now gave them their first taste

of how to work with bees out in the

open.

So we brought them up to our own

association apiary.

Let them handle bees.

Just let them see how to treat bees,

not to be narky with bees,

how to light your smoker, all that

sort of thing.

Tell me where to stand, by the way.

Jeeze, there's not brood at all,

lads.

We're in big trouble here.

We have no brood, we have no eggs.

We have nothing in this life.

So that would eventually die out.

The next thing you hear, everyone

will be in to rob this.

Now, that's ivy honey. That's ivy,

honey.

That's ivy honey.

We're a great colony last...

It is, yeah.

last September.

There you are.

Ivy honey, in the past, we would

normally have taken

the whole lot of it away.

Because all bees, you see,

and a bit like humans,

they can't store water, so they

have to take in water every day.

Now, the ivy honey gets solid

almost immediately like a brick,

so they would need to take in water

to melt that down a bit

for themselves before

they could use it.

Now, it could have been a bad winter

or

they could have had a few bad days

and they might have been able to

bring in water.

So without food then and without

getting proper nourishment,

they would really starve inside of a

few days.

So that could have been what

happened to one of them because

as you've seen, all the others were

excellent.

They were teeming with bees.

So we've seen the beehives, but

what's going on in there?

The average honey beehive has a few

components, but in a way,

it's a lot like a house that we live

in.

Bees only have one entrance,

a front door, just above the floor.

On top of that, you have the brood

chamber or brood box,

which is like the ground floor of

their house.

It's where the nursery is, and of

course, where the queen lives.

Above this, some beekeepers use

a queen excluder,

a gate that ensures the queen

cannot enter the upper

levels of the hive.

Above the queen excluder are

the supers,

which are added during the summer

to store honey and taken away

at the end the honey flow.

Each super contains around 11 frames

of honey comb.

This comb consists of foundation

wax given by the beekeeper

that the bees build onto

and fill with honey.



(Buzzing)

Just outside Portlaoise,

beekeeper Paul Foyle visits one of

his apiaries.



I like looking at bees.

It's a real pleasure to see them

work, to wonder where they've been

visiting to collect nectar or

pollen,

knowing that they all have different

functions in the hives.

When you open a high of bees,

there's cleaner bees,

and there's nurse bees, there's

guard bees like this guy here.

It's quite organised.

It's very organised in fact.

There are as many ways to keep bees

as there are beekeepers,

but there are a few tools that's good

to have handy.

There's two parts this, it's a

so-called hive tool,

but you can use a screwdriver,

it's fine, and a scraper.

I had a bee brush, I lost it.

So now I tend to use either

raspberry leaves or ivy leaves,

whatever's to hand.

But leaves are perfectly fine, I

find.

I'm kind of a sparing user of

smokers, really.

I'll often if the bees are placid,

I won't tend to smoke them much

at all, really,

because I'll just have a smoker on

one side.

The bees will pick up on the fact

that there's smoke in the area.

And when there's smoke, bees eat

nectar.

So they're basically saying, Okay,

we could get burned out here.

We'll take as much honey as we can.

It's a sting suppressor, as it were.

Even though I haven't smoked this

frame as such,

they're all busy eating up honey,

just in case.

I used to put notes of paper

underneath the roof.

Water colour paper is good because

it's quite resistant

to getting rained upon because

sometimes when you open your hive,

unfortunately, it'll be a wet day,

but you have to go ahead and do

some things which are

very time critical.

But then I found when I take the

hive lid off,

the sheets of pepper sometimes will

stick to the lid

and they fly here and there. So now

I put them on the outside.

I can literally just look at the

hive

and I know what the condition of

that hive is

from my notes on the outside

instantly.

There's a saying about beekeepers,

Ask four of them a question and get

five answers,

which is another way of saying

there's lots of different ways to

keep bees.

While most beekeepers keep some

hive records,

some are more organised than others.

The Mac Giolla Codas are one of

Ireland's beekeeping dynasties.

All summer long, Father Micheal and

daughter Aoife tend

to their many apiaries at a meeting

point in Limerick, Tipperary,

and Cork, in the shadow of the Galtee

Mountains.

Each page is a hive, and that is the

The one hive.

That is the one we are working

on here is the name

of this apiary is Behionach.

This is, we say, B-H, just two

letters, Behionach.

There it is up to now.

Every year, that's a year that is

one, two, three years.

This is the fourth year now we're

working on.

I like everything about beekeeping,

I suppose, really, from start to

finish.

I mean, it's an ancient craft, a

very ancient craft,

and it has been handed down

from generation to generation.

That is one of the reasons,

I suppose, that I took

it up in the first place.

I wanted to continue it

what I learnt from my father

and my mother.

They were both very interested

in the bees,

and I learnt quite a lot about

beekeeping from them.

I've been very lucky that my

daughter, Aoife,

was passionate about the bees,

and she gave up her own profession

and came home here to build a house

right beside us.

And we have her children here,

and she took over the bees for me,

and she's working them there now to

perfection.

It was good growing up around bees.

Sometimes it was a bit annoying.

I mean, always liked bees,

but, I mean, there were times as a

child

where you'd get sick of them,

just I think, being stung.

I'd get stung quite a bit.

Being stung is my least favourite

thing about being a beekeeper.

I don't enjoy that at all.

You never get used to it.

You sort of just accept it.

I've begun to tell myself

that I'm going to live forever being

stung

because I read that it helps start

writing and stuff like that.

And most beekeepers seem to live

to a right bell age,

so I'm convincing myself the bee

stings is the reason why,

so I don't feel as bad.

One time, my son was helping me

work bees,

and he was getting on pretty well.

But then they found out that he was

wearing shoes and socks.

And so once they find a weak spot,

as it were,

and they start stinging him through

his socks,

because of how they work in

stinging,

they produce a very high pitch sound

when they're going to sting.

They also release a pheromone when

they sting

to let other bees know that, Look,

I've had a sting here.

You can sting here as well. It

works.

And they know from your reaction

that it's worked.

They can smell you at 80 metres.

They can recognise you.

They can scream you.

So they know exactly your mood.

And what I've discovered is that I

used to have gloves,

and when you have gloves,

you have no fear because you have

gloves.

But you can have fear in your mind

and they're going to sting you.

If you have no gloves like me,

I never wear gloves,

you have to have no fear in your

mind,

and then you don't get sting, o

much less.

Meet Tanguy de Toulgouet, a gardener

who shares

the Mac Giolla Codas' interest in

native bees.

(Tranquil music)

They would be typical black bees,

they're very quiet.

See where they go, they go back in.

We are in Dunmore Country School.

Dunmore Country School is situated

in Durrow, County Laois.

We have a garden on one acre,

which is a sustainable garden

with different type of fruit trees,

apple, pears, black currant.

We have a lot of herbs, mostly that

are used for bees,

micro wasps, to create a microsystem

that help the veg to grow

in a healthier manner.

The warr system is different

because it's a box

like a nest box for birds.

This type of beekeeping is different

than the beekeeping in a frame

which is more rationalised,

protocolised.

I have some small boxes like this,

which are quite close to...

It's called a crate, actually.

Those small boxes are going to go

above the hive, the warr hive,

the full colony in July.

Without happening too much, I can

just remove that.

You'll be able to see the bees on

there.

See, it can come up.

That's an empty super.

You see all the bees.

You don't disturb them too much.

You see, they are not moving.

I think that beekeeping in boxes

like this

is more like a hunter-gatherer type

of beekeeping,

where you harvest honey like from a

wild colony.

You can really help them to survive

the trouble they are facing and that

they are going to face.

Back in the Galtees, the Mac Giolla

Codas are working

on the other side of their bee

business:

breeding native Irish Queens.

Yeah, do you want to see?

You can wait and I'll show you how

we make them.

In nature, honey bee colonies

reproduce by swarming.

But beekeepers have a little trick,

helping them along without

splitting their numbers.

With making these little apoideas,

we have our virgin queen bees

that have hatched the previous day

in the incubator,

and we will bring them out,

a batch of these queen bees,

out to the apiary with us with

our apoideas,

and we will put a virgin queen bee

into an apoidea,

and then we will collect bees

from the hives,

and we will just scoop a mug full

of bees

from the bucket of bees we've

collected,

and pour it into the apoidea and

close it up.



And that's a new little colony

of bees

then with the virgin queen and the

mug full of bees.

After that, the apoideas are taken

back to their mating apiary,

where the queens can head

off on their mating flight.

Once a queen starts laying eggs,

she can be passed on to another

beekeeper,

for the post, of course.

A queen bee lays two types of eggs.

For fertilised eggs, which become

female bees,

and unfertilised eggs, which have

become male bees,

also known as drones.

A fertilised or female egg can become

either a worker or a queen.

When it's time to rear a new queen,

the whole hive gets involved.

The worker bees prepare a special

larger cell on the honeycomb

called queen cell or queen cup.

At some point, the queen may lay an

egg in that queen cup.

Then, the larva is fed a special

diet,

including large amount of a substance

called royal jelly.

As she grows, workers increase the

size

of the cell along the comb and put a

cap at the end.

Around 16 days after the egg is

laid,

a fully formed adult virgin queen

will emerge from the cell.

Then she'll do one of two things.

Either she will stay in the hive,

in which case she will destroy any

remaining queen cells,

leave her her mating flight, return,

and take control of the hive,

or she will swarm,

taking around half the bees in the

hive to find a new place to live.

Sometimes this will happen several

times

where the second queen takes

half of the remaining bees,

as her queen takes half of that half,

and so on,

until swarms are comprised of small

volumes of bees the size of a pint,

a mug, or even a tea cup.



If you want to know if your hive

will swarm,

you have to know if there's

a queen

but she can be difficult to spot.

(Buzzing)

(Birdsong)

The number one, I'd say for me in

terms of

my work as a beekeeper is seeing the

queen.

So the queen is obviously one of the

the most important

bees in the beehive.

Now, it's a bit of a cooperative.

She doesn't rule the hive as such,

so she produces hormones that

control the other workers.

But they in turn will obviously,

for example,

control her in some ways.

For example, they'll feed her less

before swarming,

so she's light enough to swarm.

They might feed her less in times

of scarcity, so she stops laying.

So it's a bit of a two.

It's quite cooperative in that

regard.

But seeing her is a real boon

because

for many months of the year,

you won't open the hive

and you won't see her. During the

summer, you can.

If you don't mark the queens,

as I often didn't,

and sometimes still don't, they're

quite hard to spot.

They're quite hard to spot.

So when you see one, that's a real

treat.



Up in the mountains of Donegal,

John McFadden is also looking for his

queen.

John McFadden is my name.

I'm a retired member of the Garda.

I retired a number of years ago.

I was on road policing,

and I suppose I got into beekeeping

shortly after retired.

My father, God rest him while he

wanted to get bees

and never seemed to have got round

to it

And I suppose it sewed the seed in

my mind

that I'd like to get involved with

bees.

I've always had a very deep interest

in wildlife

all down through my life and

watching wildlife films.

I just had an interest in bees.

I bought bees down in Wexford

and brought them back to

Donegal.

They're native black Irish bees.

That was a number of years ago,

and I've built up the colonies since

I've learnt a lot since.

I've done courses since.

It's a steep learning curve.

It's something for people who might

think, Yeah,

just get a box of bees, put them

down in the garden,

laugh and say, Great.

Bees, nature, green, fantastic.

It's fantastic, but there's a lot of

learning curve in it.

Now, Just let her dry a wee bit.

It's not just new bees the Mac Giolla

Codas are interested in.

It's new beekeepers.

Every summer, they take on interns

to help out

and learn at their side.

My name is Aaron.

I'm from the United States.

So back home, I'm a novice mead

maker, a mead brewer.

Mead is an Irish honey wine,

and I have no other connection with

bees.

You're having a hand in creating

something...

Well, the bees are creating it, but

you're guiding them along in a way.

You're making sure that they're

healthy and happy.

They have no idea that you're there.

You're almost playing like God

to their hives,

and you're responsible for them.

It feels like you're connected

in a way to everything.

(Chatter)

I'm Ewan, 19, and I'm here on an

internship for the summer.

I'm here to learn how to breed bees

and to set up

beekeeping in a commercial way.

Because there's so many bees

in this hive, when I open them up,

they just all came out, really.

And these bees are the younger work

of bee,

so there won't be foraging outside

the hive.

I'm a member of the County Cavan

Beekeeper's Association,

and I'm also on the committee.

The year I came to Ireland,

I became a beekeeper and joined the

association.

But I was the youngest person there

by about 25 years.

With so many other traditional

crafts being lost,

it's nice to see a new generation

diving into beekeeping.

Pauline Walsh isn't exactly an

intern,

but Aoife and Micheal have taken her

under their wing.

Who did number six? Okay. Oh, yeah.

Pauline, you had a test frame,

wasn't it?

I did six, five.

Yeah, so I write that.

Oh, you put it. I did it.

So we write it across. Okay, sorry.

It's exciting because I'm not

a beekeeper

because I'm being kept by the bees.

No matter if you're as addicted as I

am,

it's definitely wake up and winter

is very long.

At one native Irish Honey Bee

Society event,

Aoife was there, so she asked me,

Would I like to come to her one day

a week for mentoring?

I don't think I'll ever stop going

for my day.

It's like my bee treat to go up

there.

I wake up with cramps in my legs,

sometimes thinking,

stretching the leg and wonder,

Is that my corbicula?

That is the pollen basket on bee's

leg,

for those who don't know.

I'm thinking, Oh my God, you've

become a bee.

Two years ago, I had collected so

many swarms.

One evening, I went to bed and I

woke my husband.

I said, There's bees have come in

under the eaves.

I can hear them. I can hear the

noise.

He said, No, you're hearing things.

No, they're there.

But I'd had so many bees swarms in

my head.

All I could hear was bees in my

sleep.

So I don't know, they're mystical.

They're teaching us so much,

and there's so much to learn about

them.

No matter what you do, they'll do

something else

that you think you've caught up with

what they're doing.

They'll change their minds and

they'll allow you to be mystified.

Once people know you're a beekeeper,

and you're a new beekeeper in the

area, you get swarms.

Now, this time of the year, it's

usually wasps,

but I will go to a wasp call out,

tell people what to do,

and show them a picture of a bee.

How do you collect a swarm?

It's quite straightforward, really.

But as I said, the conditions, if

it's high up in a tree,

you can more or less forget about

it

because it's just too much of a

hazard.

If they're in somebody's eave of a

house, I wouldn't go near it.

Lots of beekeepers also collect

swarms on the side or remove

long-term colonies to set up shop

where they shouldn't.

It can be difficult, painful work,

but when everything goes to plan,

you get free bees.

Of course, it doesn't always go to

plan.

There was bees in the roof of the

garage.

There was a two-storey garage,

and I said to him, I'd have a go at

removing the bees.

We're looking at the bees in roof

here.

They're going in here and they're

going in here.

There's a truss here.

You can see that's the first truss

of the building.

The second truss is on top of the

wall.

It's about a foot in.

That's 300 millimetres.

They're behind that second truss.

So in other words, I can't get them

easily.

If they were between the first two,

it would be very easy to get them.

But because they're back there,

I can see comb between the slates

and the felt.

It's unworkable to even put a hose

pipe in there to get them out.

What we initially thought was two

colonies,

one at the very top and one at the

gutter level.

But when we got there on the day,

they thought it was three colonies.

There was one in between.

I felt they were fairly

well-tempered bees, personally.

The lowest colony, which we did on

the second day,

were perhaps a bit more angry.

Well, Rory got a sting of a bee,

he was operating the crane on the

ground.

The bees had been annoying him

a little bit,

even though he was quite a ways away

from the colony where we were.

Eventually, not long after, 10, 15

minutes,

he experienced some difficulty

breathing,

so we took him to hospital.

So they, you know, describe them as

being allergic.

So he's not working with bees

any more at this point.

The second day was the last colony,

but it was a bit... it was quite a

large colony,

a lot of honeycomb in the overhang,

but also behind the guttering.

So hoovering, to my mind, right now,

it's unideal because using a regular

hoover,

at least anyway, because now that

those colonies came out as queened.

One of them, subsequently, has

passed away,

and another one did re-queen,

but the queen was very, very...

I'd say over five weeks before it

started laying, six weeks.

My name is Kyle Petrie,

and I'm a co-founder of Open Open

Hive Honey,

and I'm a full-time beekeeper.

Open Hive was founded in 2019.

Myself and a friend, Mark Earley,

set it up.

And a third beekeeper, Jack McGrath,

then, joined us a year later.

So the way that we ended up putting

bees here on the roof of the Devlin

was through one of our corporate

sponsors, Power's Whisky,

who were looking to do something

positive.

So they and concert a couple of

apiaries with us, and one of their

partners was here in the Devlin.

So they came together and the Devlin

had the space,

and Power's wanted to do something

to help our native Irish honeybees,

and the Devlin then used the honey

that's produced here

on the roof through their menu,

through their c*ck,

that they're able to actually tell

the story

of our native Irish honey bee.

As the patrons are sitting there,

they can look at the windows,

see the bees foraging, bringing back

pollen, nectar,

and doing what they do,

and then actually experience that

honey themselves through the menu.

Some things are very difficult to

communicate in the likes

of climate change because people

can't see the impact

or they can't see anything tangible.

But to be able to see the bees

coming and going

while you're having a c*ck that

has their honey in it

is a really strong story.

So we know bees make honey, but how?

To start, a few scout bees will

leave the hive to look

for sources of nectar and pollen.

Once the scout bee lands on a flower

that's yielding nectar,

they will suck it up and fly back

to the hive,

where they start to do a dance called

the Waggle Dance.

This dance is like a map drawn

through vibrations,

and the honeycomb is specifically

constructed to allow these

vibrations to expand across each

frame.

Bees who witnessed this dance will

then fly out to the same nectar

source, fill themselves up in

nectar,

fly back to the hive, and do the same

waggle dance

to more bees in the hive.

Over the course of the next hour or

so,

more and more bees will fly out to

the same area

and return with nectar.

A bee takes nectar into a stomach in

her body called a honey stomach.

And once she's done her waggle dance,

she'll regurgitate the nectar up and

give it to a younger bee

called a honey processor.

The honey processor will take that

nectar to a cell in the hive,

where she'll regurgitate it up again,

and then she'll swallow it,

and then regurgitate regurgitated,

and she'll continue swallowing

and regurgitating each drop up to 20

times.

The reason she does this is because

she's adding an enzyme from her own

body to the nectar, and this is what

actually makes honey, honey.

Once enough enzyme has been added,

she'll deposit the final nectar

in a cell,

and the colony will create an airflow

through the hive

to evaporate moisture from the

nectar until it becomes honey.



When a cell is full, they will seal

it with a layer of beeswax.

Honey sealed in a comb like this can

last for years without spoiling.



In Limerick, Pauline Walsh has rented

a local hall for her association.

Now, here, sweetie.

Now, go wash your hands as well,

please.

(Chatter)

I set up the Three Counties

Association

with other members in 2016.

Our membership has increased,

and there's two of us

that have extractors.

To allow people to have access

to the extractor,

we rented the community centre

because I used a hand extractor

once that had three frames in it.

I just said, Never, ever, ever,

again,

I wanted a green button and a red

button.

We're learning.

It's really exciting when you see a

new person.

I get excited still when I see my

first harvest.

I have fallen in love, and

definitely fallen in love

with the native Irish black bee.

Well, that is a subject that's

really dear to my heart,

the native bees, because I always

believed that

they existed in Ireland, although

there was a theory that they

had become extinct.

Today, scientists Grace and Keith

are hitting the road to check

in with some citizen scientists

who keep an eye on so-called

free-living colonies

of bees in roofs and trees.

You can start first, since you're

the senior person.

You're going to be boss.

I'm Grace McCormack, and I'm a

professor in zoology at NUI Galway.

And I'm Keith Browne.

So I'm Grace's PhD student

in NUI Galway,

and I'm working on honey bees.

This colony here is a free living,

unmanaged colony that we keep

an eye on, PJ told us about.

In 2016, we initiated a citizen

science study looking for any

free living colonies anywhere in the

country.

From that, we got over 180 confirmed

colony locations.

And it gives us a great insight into

where the bees actually are.

Apart from buildings, they're in

walls.

There's a lot of them actually in

old buildings, in old castles.

They also turn up in graves, they

turn up in hollow statues,

they turn up in bird boxes.

They'll go for any cavity that they

can to get into.

And the majority of those

respondents are just members

of the public who have no connection

with beekeeping.

They're just interested in

pollinators.

They're interested in the plight of

funny bees.

And quite often, the honeybees live

in roof space in the house,

and they're welcome guests.

(Buzzing)

We'll leave it on the ground until

we're ready to go.

Otherwise...

My name is Jennifer Fisher,

and my husband is Paul Troke,

and we live here in Tooreen.

We both have an interest in ecology

and the environment.

I'm an ecologist, and my husband's

an ornithologist,

and he does bird surveys,

and he's really interested in the

natural environment as well.

When we moved into the house, we

noticed that the fascias had bees

residing there, but they did die off

at one point,

but then a new colony came along and

recolonised it.

I think it's great.

I can't understand why people

wouldn't want to have bees

around or the wildlife.

I mean, all wildlife is really

fascinating and interesting.

And there's something about it as

well that it's peaceful to be out

in the garden where there's lots of

bees buzzing and birds singing.

We became beekeepers so that we

would understand what beekeepers go

through, understand the whole

process,

and be able to talk on an equal

footing with beekeepers about

the questions and the problem.

So I think when we started, the

original perceived threat we

learnt about was the threat of

hybridisation.

So after the Isle of Wight disease,

bees started being imported into

Ireland in much higher quantity.

And so we have the arrival of

Buckfast

Carniolan bees and ligustica.

I think that's what a lot of

beekeepers are apprehensive about.

That's the first threat to pure

Apis mellifera mellifera.

Of course, that's not a threat

to the Buckfast Carniolans.

The request originally came in from

Native Irish Honeybees Society

to see whether or not we had

pure Apis mellifera mellifera in the

country.

As far as they were concerned, they

did.

They'd be reading for that.

But so we weren't so much finding

pure Apis mellifera mellifera,

but backing up what the lead group

is already retelling us.

Apis mellifera mellifera is pretty

much extinct in the wild.

There are a few conservation areas

where

they have pure Apis mellifera

mellifera as pure as we have here,

but not covering an entire country

and not outside of conservation

areas.

So Europe have become aware of this

through our research,

and they're now looking in and

going, Okay,

you've got this extremely important

population,

a nd they're watching to see what we

do with it.

The future of beekeeping here needs

to take that into account,

that we have a very important

resource, not only for Ireland,

but for the rest of Europe as well.

What we found was that,

especially in South County, Dublin,

was that when the bees would go off,

the queen would go off to get mated,

she would often come back and we'd

have non-native bees

hybridised from foreign species,

and our bees were getting mixed with

that.

We found that actually we could do

more as an organisation

rather than to individual beekeepers

as a voice for our native Irish

honey bee.

So we founded Open Hive as a

by-product of keeping bees.

We produce honey that fuels the

conservation work that we do.

There are people that are very

animated about this subject

and about what's right and what's

wrong.

And I think really the best way to

change anybody's mind is to set

an example and show what can be

done.

A lot of people think that Irish

bees don't produce as much honey,

so therefore they import other

species.

But we're living proof that Open

Hive produces enough honey

to sustain a full-time beekeeper

and a couple

of part-time beekeepers.

So it's basically creating an

example for other

people to hopefully follow.

Back in the Liberties, Anthony is

headed

to a rooftop apiary for a bee's-eye

view of the city.

Right now, we're on the roof of GEC,

Guinness Enterprise Centre, and we

keep six hives on the roof of GEC.

So at one point we had 20 hives on

this roof

because they allowed us,

but we've since moved them on

because it was causing a lot of

competition

and they weren't getting enough

nectar and pollen,

so we changed that around a bit and

moved them outside the area.

But this is a really important space

because of the self-seeding roof.

I really like it.

It's just really peaceful and it's

enjoyable to come up here

and spend time with the bees and

just sit around and watch.

It's very easy to get lost and

drowned in the city

when it comes to just waking up

and having to look at grey walls all

day.

Green in the space has a big and it

just seems to be a lack of that.

There is programmes going on,

the council are doing wild gardens

and stuff like that,

but they're doing it themselves.

I honestly think you'd get more joy

if they send people

into communities and teach them

on the fish situation,

teach the communities how to do

this greening themselves,

go in and teach someone in the

community to teach the rest

of the community, and that's how

you'll really have an effect.

And that's how you'll get the people

buying into

the climate change argument

and stuff like that.

Right now, no one cares because,

especially in the city,

nature is something you visit for a

day.

You're not part of it.

But actually, in a city, it's full

of it.

It's teeming with life when you

actually sit and watch.

You watch the plants, you watch

the birds, you watch everything.

It's teeming with life.

The countryside is dedicated to

monoculture.

You're dedicating to one plant,

whereas in the urban setting,

you have gardens everywhere, you

have parks,

and it's all different plants.

So it's a lot more healthier for

bees to have that variation

of plants and flowers.

So I'm really hopeful for city

beekeeping or not even beekeeping.

I don't think everybody should be

a keep is

because you're creating competition.

But just getting involved and

learning about pollinators

and learning how you can affect the

conservation of pollinators

just with a small amount of plants

outside your door or on your window

box, because it really is beneficial

for bees to see.

It's September.

The last honey harvest of the year

has been taken,

and the swarm season is almost over.

But nature can always surprise you.

In Pauline Walsh's back garden,

there's some unusual activity near

her hives.

It's an amazing sensation.

I've never done this before.

I was checking to see if there was

a queen present,

which you'd find out by seeing eggs,

which there are, but there were

yesterday's or late last night's

eggs because they're slightly

tilted.

I was looking also for queen cells

to know if they were wearing a queen

because of this

buzzing and humming around the

place.

It sounds like it's warm, but

they're frantic to eating.

I don't know what they're doing.

But this season is a strange season.

They shouldn't.

They should be happy and

not in swarm mode.

I was bewildered as to what they

were doing.

I wasn't sure whether it was

a swarm this late as it's

a week off September.

It's not swarming season.

I didn't know whether a flow had

come on, a swarm had come on.

So we came down and checked

the bottom of the garden,

came back up, and there was

a little cluster on the path.

There's a queen. Look.

See her?

It's a queen.

I don't know where she come from.

But it was...

I don't know what I'm going to do.

(Giggles)

I found the queen in the middle,

and she was on my finger,

which was just awesome to have

this little queen on my finger.

Then she disappeared, and she went

back to the same spot.

I put an apoidea on top of her,

just an open to the bottom,

but an allowed enough space for them

to get in and out in case

she was a virgin queen or was going

to go somewhere that I didn't know.

What does the future hold for this

colony?

Will they still be here next year?

Who knows?

But it's these little moments that

make beekeeping feel so special.

If the bees get very angry, I just

say, Okay, and I put

everything back and I leave.

But actually, as soon as you leave,

I want to go back again.

It's addictive.

What I like in honey bee, I suppose,

is the fact that you

have so much different products,

so much different smell between

the properties, the taste of the

honey, the taste of all the mead.

People are very interesting in the

local honey.

I'm very supportive in asking,

and I enjoy I tell them,

but I'm no expert.

I'm only learning.

It's a huge learning curve, and I

will learn till the day I die.

Honey is a little bit incidental.

It's not my main...

my main joy is just keeping bees.

Then also, obviously, the whole

aspect of making hives,

building hives, building hives

stands.

Well, I think there's a bright

future for Irish beekeeping.

The beekeepers are multiplying all

the time.

All associations are expanding

every year, year by year.

I just think I love being able to go

out and interact

with these people because they're

all very intelligent,

they're all very observant, and

they're all very passionate.

And that passion really is what gets

you going, isn't it?

That's what gets you out there and

doesn't make you give

up when you get stung.

Oh, the bee's on the pad.

I saw her going back into the centre

of the apoidea,

so I closed the door down to just

one bee space,

make sure it was less wasp

accessible.

And this morning I moved them just

down into another sheltered space

where wasps might not actually

locate them because it was too

close to where wasps are actually.

And it was exciting to see them and

have the queen.

I know some beekeepers will say

they're not even worth looking

at or feeding, but everything is

worth the chance.