Bee-Kept (2025) Movie Script
1
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 cocktails,
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 cocktail 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.
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 cocktails,
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 cocktail 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.