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Chapter 1: What is the significance of the swarming season for Irish honeybees?
Swarming season is in full swing across the country. Queen bees are leaving their nests, allowing developing queens to inherit their thrones. And as countrywide listeners will know, there has been a long-running campaign and draft legislation to ensure special protection for Apis mellifera mellifera, the wild Irish honeybee.
Ireland's unpaid farmers without whom our hedgerows, our orchards, our meadows would go to seed. Spearheading the research into a species which not only survives in the wild but has adapted its immune system to ward off the deadly varroa mite is Professor Grace McCormick of the University of Galway. Now, whenever we talk about pollinators in this programme, the news is often not good.
But Grace has good news for the wild Irish honeybee, as she and her colleague Vicky Henshaw told a bee-suited Lorna Siggins going mad with the smoker.
It might be worth you holding it just in front of that hive to see the different noise of foragers coming from.
They're now trying to sting the microphone. Are they? No, I think they're gone. I think one of them is gone.
How do you make up the smoker? So we put newspaper in the bottom. We just light that with a lighter. Once the newspaper's lit, then we'll add the hay. And then we just keep using the bellows. until we get a nice steady stream of smoke. And that'll just keep going. We don't need to use it very often. It's very rare we use a smoker. Really? Yeah, the bees are nice and docile.
Sometimes they'll gather around a lot around the edges when we need to put the boxes back on. So sometimes we'll use that to... move them out of the way. If we've picked up a frame and we haven't seen a bee underneath, we might get stung, so we just smoke the glove just to hide the pheromone from the sting, because that alerts their sisters then to come and carry on finishing the job off.
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Chapter 2: What research is being conducted on the wild Irish honeybee?
The dozen hives at the University Apiary house colonies which Professor Grace and her colleagues have found. I asked her about some of the more unusual locations.
Probably a mailbox. A mailbox? One of those old iron mailboxes in a wall. One of the young post, green ones. Yeah, we found them in, I suppose, ESB boxes, you know. Other than that, you find them in the water. I haven't, but we see other people finding them in water drains. Traffic cones. A statue. Traffic cone.
Chapter 3: How does the immune system of wild Irish honeybees adapt to threats?
Traffic cone.
Traffic cone, yeah. That was corporate, wasn't it? Yeah, it was empty.
inside the traffic car it was a really easy one to remove they've been seen in like a bulldozer we found them on the silage that was interesting because the farmer had upturned the calf feeder so he had an area where he was storing all the plastic from the silage and all the rubbish and he had just flung an upside down last year, last summer and myself and Vicky rescued them out of there put them in a nook and gave them to a beekeeper that was really cool
I've been tracking Professor Grace McCormack's work on the wild Irish honeybee for over five years now, even have a couple of stings to prove it, and she has some really good news.
Yes, we have great news. Since I was talking to you last, we now have more than 820 wild colonies identified across Ireland and reports are still coming in all the time. So we found a few more in Menlo last week. We found a few more down in Killarney National Park the week before last. So we're finding them all over the country.
We still have a few gaps, and this year we are looking for them in more remote places, in our national parks, and we have been talking to the rangers around the national parks to help look for wild colonies. But yes, so Ireland, unlike many places in Europe, has a widespread, fairly numerous population of wild honeybees.
And when you started this over 10 years ago, you were told that they were virtually extinct.
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.
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