It would be sweet if native honey bee returned

THE dark European honey bee was likely a wild native insect in Ireland, but wild and feral bees have become extinct here in the past 20 years.

Bees are the only insects kept as livestock. They have been transported for centuries and domesticated for millennia. So we can’t be absolute about the native status of the wild honey bee. It’s also why wild and feral honey bees are extinct in Ireland. They were wiped out by diseases and parasites brought in from abroad. The main culprit was the infamous varroa mite.

But bee-keepers tend to be literate and they’ve been studying their subject and writing about it. An Beachaire, the journal of the Federation of Irish Beekeeping Associations, have articles fascinating to people with an interest in natural history, even if they have no intention of keeping bees. Thanks to the extensive literature on bees, we know what the Irish race of the dark European honey bee was like.

It was extremely dark in colour, almost black, and this was to help it absorb solar radiation in our overcast summers. It had further adaptations to its wings and flight muscles, which allowed it to fly in wetter and windier weather.

My statement that the native Irish honey bee is extinct is not completely true. There are some domestic colonies with a close resemblance to the wild native bee. There are bee-keepers who realise the value of these colonies and are preserving and improving them. Credit to the Galtee Bee Breeding Group and a Tipperary man, Micheal MacGiollacoda.

The value of this work extends beyond conservation. Irish strain bees have advantages in honey production. They tend to be docile and can sometimes be worked without protective clothing. Colony sizes are small but they are long-lived and productive and honey yields are high. The bees produced by selective breeding in the Galtee Bee Breeding Group are showing increasing resistance to pests and diseases, including varroa.

This is important work. If complete resistance to varroa could be achieved, feral honey bees could return to the Irish countryside. The ecological significance would be enormous. There has been attention to the role honey bees play in pollinating garden and field crops. Their role in pollinating wild plants, including trees, is not as well-known. But if honey bees ever return to live as wild insects in the Irish countryside, the benefits would be dramatic.

Everyone with an interest in wildlife and conservation should support the work that beekeepers are doing to resurrect the Irish honey bee and breed a strain resistant to varroa. The main threat to this work is the importation of foreign bees. Apparently, a lot of this is going on, some of it legal and some of it illegal — yes, I’m told there are bee smugglers. The situation isn’t helped by the fact that the bees themselves don’t respect the border between the Republic and the North.

Obviously, tighter regulation is needed. But most bee-keepers like bees, even the more commercially minded ones, so we can also appeal to their consciences to support Irish bees and their future in this country, for the sake of the bees, if nothing else.

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