Busy bees bring honey awards to Aoife

By John Rainsford

AOIFE Nic Giolla Coda knows all about bees. In fact, her family owns some of the most extensive apiaries in Ireland.
For the last eight years, she has been living in County Clare, only moving back to her native Tipperary recently with her husband and children to look after those honey-making assets.
“My aim is to work with my father and the bees, eventually taking over the honey production completely. I also kept bees in County Clare on a much smaller scale. I supplied a couple of farmers’ markets before I had children,” she explained.
“I spent three years as the secretary of the Banner Beekeepers’ Association (Banner BKA), which is the association for County Clare. I was very involved in teaching beekeeping to beginners and mentoring. I also helped to set up the apiary of native Irish bees at the Irish Seedsavers’ Association in East Clare and gave workshops in beekeeping there.”
Aoife grew up in South Tipperary, at the foot of the Galtee Mountains in Glengarra Forest, where her father was a local forester. He was, and still is, an avid beekeeper with about 150 hives of bees scattered throughout the Galtee-Vee Valley. Aoife learned most of her beekeeping skills from him and is now a fourth-generation beekeeper.
Aoife recently returned from the prestigious UK National Honey Show, near London, with plenty of trophies and awards.
“Irish honey frequently gets prizes there due to the quality of the product,” she said. “I won first prize in three classes – two jars of clear honey (gift); two sections free from ling heather and two jars of light honey. I entered honey into 16 classes and got placed in 11 of the classes. I was very happy with the results, as I have only started to show honey this year. It is very time-consuming preparing honey for show, with great emphasis placed on the tiny details. My brother, Eoghan, a beekeeper living in County Louth, came third in the 24 jar class, which is known as the ‘World Cup’.”
Sadly, Aoife reports the numbers of bees in Ireland are declining and she cites the main reasons as the plight of the native population of bees, problems resulting from importing bees, maintaining a suitable environment and the provision of education for beekeepers, particularly for those starting out.
“The main threats to native Irish bees are, without doubt, the varroa mite, associated viruses and other diseases that could possibly reach this island due to importations. The varroa mite was discovered in Ireland in 1998. We were, up until then, one of the few remaining ‘varroa-free’ countries in the world, due to our strict controls on importing bees. Bees imported into the country carried it.
“Before the varroa mite came, you would expect on average 10-15% of losses every year. After varroa hit, many beekeepers experienced, and still do experience, 25% losses every year. Some people would term this Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Many Irish beekeepers dislike using this term in Ireland, however, as the condition was first described in the USA and the factors contributing to the loss of bees there is quite different to what we have here.
“In the USA and parts of the UK and France, CCD is exacerbated, if not caused, by the proliferation of single crops (mono-cultures), long-distance transportation and the overuse of antibiotics and herbicides,” she said.
In Ireland, disease transmission is helped by our poor weather conditions. Bees are unable to fly out in very wet weather, which means they are confined in the hive for longer periods. However, in terms of colony losses, she believes Ireland is much better off than many European countries.
“Thankfully, most Irish beekeepers would not dream of importing bees. Still, the odd misguided beekeeper will get the notion that Italian bees or Carniolan bees are better. This is not the case. They do not acclimatise well to the Irish weather and thus they need much more honey to keep themselves alive,” Aoife observed.
“Native or near native Irish bees – often called black bees – are a strain of the European dark bee most common in Ireland. They do well in cold temperatures and can fly out and collect honey in the rain. They are also frugal with their honey stores. Research just carried out in Ireland also shows that resistance to the varroa mite is growing in our native bees,” she added.
Irish bees collect the majority of their honey from blackberry blossom, the common briars in the hedgerows and clover. There are many other wild flowers, tree blossoms and a couple of commercial crops, which the bees collect from. This variety of flora, like a varied diet, helps to keep them healthy.
“The destruction of hedgerows is without doubt a big threat to the bee, especially in intensive tillage areas,” said Aoife. “In our valley, we are very fortunate that very little knocking of hedgerows goes on. It is a dairy farming area and clover is also widespread.
Sixty percent of the food relies on bees for pollination. In Ireland, many of our fruits, including apples, raspberries and strawberries, have higher yields if bees have been involved in their pollination. Oilseed rape and field beans also yield better when pollinated by bees. In fact, the Department of Agriculture estimates the value of the bee as a pollinator of Irish farm crops is around €85m per annum.
However, for anyone considering starting up the business, Aoife believes education is vital. “By far the most important thing to do is to join your local beekeepers’ association and attend a beginners’ course, followed up by practical classes.
“If this is not possible, then the person should try and find a helpful beekeeper who does not mind passing on some practical knowledge. This means going with the beekeeper every time they examine their hives and just observing them working with the bees. You can also attend classes at intermediate and senior level and sit relevant exams in the subject. However, bees are complex creatures and there is so much to beekeeping that you could spend your entire life learning it.”
The reality is that beekeeping is not for everyone. Countless times Aoife has seen people insist on buying hives of bees before doing any training. The result of this action is that, come the following year, the hives are either dead or in an unhealthy state due to lack of experience on the owner’s part. Beekeeping in Ireland is also hard work and for anyone thinking of turning it into an actual business, it is even harder work.
“It is important to start out as a hobby first before thinking of developing it into a business,” said Aoife. “It is extremely enjoyable and rewarding as a hobby. Technology is not really that important. The craft of beekeeping has not changed much in the last 50 years in Ireland in terms of the types of hives used. If you are starting out, you will only need a bee suit, hive tool, smoker and a few other basic pieces of paraphernalia. The honey extractor is important for ‘spinning’ the honey out of the combs. These can be hand-worked or automatic.”
Beekeeping is also completely weather dependent. 2004 and 2006 provided bumper yields, resulting from the fine weather but 2008 and 2009 were both very poor. The West of Ireland typically has much lower honey yields due to the influence of Atlantic rain and lower temperatures in summer.
“I would definitely advise anyone starting out to buy no more than four hives to begin with,” said Aoife. “The most common way to set up would be to buy ‘nuclei’, which are about half the size of a full hive. You would then expand each ‘nucleus’ into a hive. ‘Nuclei’ cost about €150 each. Four nuclei, your bee suit, equipment and the empty hives needed to expand (plus a basic hand-worked honey extractor) come to between  €1,500 and €2,000.
“You can start up on an even smaller scale but unless you know and trust the source, buying second-hand empty hives is a common way of spreading disease to your new bees. Once you have a couple of years’ experience, you can start ‘queen rearing’, which is a more cost-effective way of increasing your stocks. Many of the most successful beekeepers in Ireland started from scratch, as a hobby and developed from there,” Aoife stated.
Many landowners are only too happy to have an apiary on their land. Aoife’s family have approximately 20 apiaries placed throughout the Galtee-Vee Valley dealing with 20 different landowners, so it is important for them to maintain good relationships. An apiary takes up only about 200ft2, so it does not impinge too much on the landowner, who may accept his rent in honey.
There are between 2,500 and 3,000 beekeepers in Ireland, north and south. Most of these would have an average of between six and eight hives. About 10% of this total is semi-commercial. Although, the amount varies from year to year, about 50 tonnes of honey is produced per annum in Ireland.
The yields also vary hugely depending on the region. The South and South-East generally have the highest yield. This has been helped by a growing awareness by the wider public of the importance of bees and of the threats to them in both urban and rural areas.
While it is more common to have bees in rural areas, it is possible to keep bees in an urban setting, as long as there is enough forage nearby in gardens and parks. Incredibly, in huge cities like London and Paris, bees are often kept on rooftops.
“A few years ago, the Galtee Bee Breeding Group held a Beard of Bees world record attempt near one of our apiaries and the president of the Federation of Irish Beekeepers’ Associations (FIBKA) was the ‘bee beard’ victim. We did not break the world record but we managed to cover him with an amazing 220,000 bees.
“However, despite such efforts, many people in Ireland still fear bees and often confuse them with wasps. Children’s cartoons wrongly depict bees as being yellow and black when, in fact, it is only wasps that are yellow and black and bees are generally brownish in colour. At the end of the summer when wasps are dying off, they become aggressive. Sometimes people ring us up complaining about a hive of bees, which is located in their shed, chimney or bush. However, 90% of the time it is a nest of wasps, who give bees a bad name”
This is ignorance, she feels, which should be addressed through education from an early age.
“Children should be taught about bees at school and beekeepers should be invited in to give talks to them. I and other members of my family have done this in the past. We have also brought along an ‘observation hive’, which is a temporary glass case containing a few frames of bees. It is completely safe and shows the inner workings of the colony,” she said.
For more information, visit www.irishbeekeeping.ie or email bannerbees@gmail.com to get in contact with Banner BKA.