All hail the Irish Queen Bee

When a six-year-old knows the Latin names of his grandmother’s garden plants, the seed has surely been planted for a love of all things horticultural. Now, 20 years later, Ewan Fuller looks at flowers, trees and plants from a pollinator’s perspective. He wants people to understand the importance of keeping the Native Irish Black Bee alive and thriving.

Currently he is finishing a course in Apiculture in Galway and has newly founded the ‘Virginia Queen Rearing Group’ with support from the ‘Native Irish Honey Bee Society’.

Ewan explains a bee is not a bee. As opposed to its continental family, the Irish Honey Bee doesn’t have bright yellow stripes. She is darker, smaller, hairier, with shorter legs and tongue, making her well-suited for the cool, wet Irish climate.

Besides pesticides and habitat loss, one of the biggest threats to the Irish Bee is the Buckfast Bee – a hybrid mix of Italian and European Bees promising more honey, low swarming tendency and disease resistance. From a commercial beekeeper’s perspective, breeding these traits into the Irish bee might make sense. But possibly only for one or two generations, explains Ewan Fuller.

What follows is “hybrid aggression”, impacting the handling of the bees and the overall well-being of the bee colonies. He has seen hybrid colonies with “very panicky bees”, which means they are more likely to attack their beekeeper, making the monitoring of bees difficult. Also, these bees are simply not acclimatised.

One major difference in behaviour is the timing of egg-laying, explains Ewan. While a European queen bee will start laying once the days get longer - instinctually assuming that there is enough food available in a warmer environment to feed the brood - the Irish Queen doesn’t start until there is enough food in store, sometimes waiting until late March, April. This potentially results in a smaller colony with less honey, but a more climate resilient colony.

The Native Irish Honey Bee is a strain of the Dark European Honey Bee, which was once native to most of Europe north of the Alps. It is now relatively scarce in mainland Europe. Maintaining the genetic integrity of the Irish Black Bee involves several measures. One being discouraging the importation of non-native bees. Another being breeding Irish bees.

Once Ewan was one of the youngest members of the Cavan Beekeepers Society. In recent years, he has seen a growing interest in beekeeping and is keen to help new beekeepers.

Through the Virginia Queen Rearing Group, around 25 people from around east Cavan, Meath and Monaghan have joined Ewan to learn about queen rearing, the first step to breeding. The attention lies with mimicking a natural habitat for the worker bees. In order to raise new queens, the worker bees have to be naturally triggered to make new queen cells.

A typical wooden hive consists of multiple wax frames on which bees store pollen, honey and tend to larvae. Every frame carries hundreds of bees. The idea is to take out one of the frames with fertilised bee eggs along with the working bees, and drop it into a special kit. The bees will then want to make new queen cells, which will be easily detectable on the frame, because they look like peanut shells.

It takes a bit of practice and experience with bee handling, but Ewan is eager to help preserve the buzz of the Apis mellifera mellifera.