Beekeeping In Ireland, Continued

Blessed with a large population of relatives and friends living in Ireland, we spend a couple of weeks every summer visiting that gorgeous green island. This year we tracked down a couple of Irish beekeepers and learned how they do things. This column is the second in a two-part series that began on September 15.

Michael Curran, owner of East Clare Apiaries, keeps 200 hives in County Clare. That makes him one of Ireland’s biggest beekeepers. He also possesses a connoisseur’s palate for honey.We invite him out to Patrick’s family home to see if it might be a suitable place for some hives. My mother-in-law, Mamie, brings him a bottle of honey with the label concealed, and asks if he can tell where it’s from by the taste—something I, as a hopelessly inept beekeeper, think is an impossible request. He closes his eyes and takes a long inhale of the honey’s fragrance. Then a taste. “Portugal or Argentina.”

Bingo—the honey is from Portugal.

Besides being expert at parlor games involving honey, Mr. Curran is also chairman of the Banner Bee Keepers Association in County Clare. He began beekeeping about 25 years ago. Shortly after varroa mites found their way to Ireland in 1998, he lost all but two of his 100 hives to the parasites. “I was going to quit, but I missed them,” he says. He now has 200 hives spread across east Clare.

A widower, Mr. Curran lives with four dogs, two of which are determined to sit on my lap while we talk. Not a problem for Cassie, the Jack Russell, but Allie the Rottweiler just isn’t lapdog material. She finally decides to entertain herself by throwing a car tire around the yard.

Although Mr. Curran started out with the traditional black bees that many consider the native Irish bee, he’s not a big fan, and he’s not convinced any true Irish bees remain on the island. Native or not, he says, he found the black bees unpleasant to work with. “They’ll meet you coming in at the gate,” he says, referring to their tendency to be very protective of their hive area and aggressive toward interlopers. “Saying that, they do produce a lot of honey, but I have to work with them.”

The beekeeper tried various strains of bees over the years and finally settled on Buckfast about 10 years ago. The Buckfast was genetically engineered through careful breeding by Brother Adam, a monk at Buckfast Abbey in the United Kingdom, after tracheal mites devastated bee populations across Europe in the early 20th century. Besides proving themselves resistant to mites, Buckfasts are noteworthy for high productivity and a gentle temperament.

“I get queens every couple of years from Denmark,” Mr. Curran says. “They’re very docile, they build up fast in the spring, and they have a big brood nest. And when the nectar comes, they’ll bring it in.”

In a good year, East Clare Apiaries can produce 3,000 pounds of honey. This is not a good year. “It’s been a bad summer,” Mr. Curran says. “The hives were full of honey in July, and I went back a couple of weeks ago to harvest, and they have half the honey taken down.” Endless rain this summer left the bees confined to quarters and eating up their stockpiles. If he’s lucky, he anticipates bringing in 1,500 pounds of honey this year, which he’ll sell at local shops.

He explains that in Ireland, there is virtually no large-scale trucking of bees to pollinate crops, and most beekeepers operate on a much smaller scale than the industrial beekeepers that manage thousands of hives each in the U.S.

“I think that’s where all your problems began over there,” he says, referring to devastating loss of honeybee colonies that plague the U.S. every year, and the stress on bees caused by trucking them from one location to another, often across hundreds of miles, for commercial crop pollination.

Bees are also supported by the Irish government in its land stewardship policies: Hedgerows can’t be cut back until fall, ensuring that badgers, foxes, hedgehogs, bees and other wildlife dependent on these havens to raise their young and find their food can do so undisturbed.

GMO crops are not permitted in Ireland nor the rest of Europe, a policy that keeps the use of herbicides down and the bloom of wildflowers up. In the U.S., GMO crops are engineered to withstand herbicide spraying, so farmers spray everything, killing wildflowers and other weeds, and leaving the desired crop plants alive. Unfortunately, this practice starves out pollinators that rely on those wildflowers to live.

“Going back maybe 50 years, every second house had bees,” remembers Mr. Curran. While beekeeping fell out of custom over the years, media attention to the plight of the honeybee has generated renewed interest. “We’re promoting it as much as we can,” he says. “We have classes for beginners, workshops on how to control swarming and how to raise queens. We get a lot of beginners, but out of 10 that start, we might get two that stick with it. Once they get a bad stinging …”

While we’re talking, we’ve moved outside and Mr. Curran is checking a few of the colonies in his yard. One irritated bee stings him squarely on the chin, but he carries on chatting, not seeming to notice the swelling, which is making me wince with empathy. I’ve gotten much more sanguine about being stung, but his level of stoicism is impressive. Maybe the lesson for Irish beekeepers, like the rest of us, is to stick with it, in spite of everything. It’s the challenges that make the rewards so sweet.