Vicky Henshaw

So yeah, we were told they were extinct.

Once Varroa, this parasitic mite, came over to the west from Asia, it really decimated populations and it's still causing massive problems.

So the understanding was that Varroa made wild colony bees extinct.

They couldn't survive any more than maybe two, three years with Varroa.

And this was the case, actually, and it's still the case in many parts of Europe.

So there have been studies to suggest, like in Germany, that basically they don't have a sustainable population of wild colonies.

December 2025, the IUCN, the new report, has now designated wild honeybees as endangered in EU27.

Yes and when I started the last report in 2014 said that really I suppose the data on honeybees was data deficient.

Some countries they have to actually kill wild colonies when they find them because of the perceived threat of wild colonies to managed colonies but in Ireland oh my god we have such a unique wonderful situation in Ireland.

We've been funded by Research Ireland for the last four years on understanding adaptation diversity of wild honeybees in Ireland so we've

It's great.

We've learned a lot.

And two of the really important finds are one is that wild honeybees get accused of spreading disease.

But Alex Valentine, my PhD student who's just submitted, she's shown that we compared wild and managed bees across 16 of the important pathogens and we didn't find any significant difference between wild or managed bees.

that really indicates that wild colonies are not a threat.

And what we've shown is that more than half of the colonies that we actually included survived multiple years.

So we can detect the daughter and the granddaughter and the great-granddaughter of the original queen.

So we know it's the same line of bees.

And we have two important colonies in Galway that we've been actually monitoring since 2016.

And we know that they're longer because they're in people's houses.