Why do we all love Irish strawberries?

FRESHNESS, for one! Strawberries are best picked in the morning and, if you are not lucky enough to eat them immediately, they are usually in store the next day – while imports take two days to travel here.

And even though we complain about the rain, strawberries need lots of water and Ireland has it in spades (and buckets). Nowadays, most of our strawberries are grown undercover, but we collect rainwater on the roof of our glasshouses and recycle it to use in our growing.

Strawberries are by far the most popular soft fruit grown in Ireland and traditionally, they are associated with summer, with May and June being the prime months for picking field-grown crops.

Developments in horticulture allow for strawberries to grow undercover, either in glasshouses or in tunnels, and Irish strawberries are now available about nine months of the year. However, for many, there is nothing to beat the flavour of a summer strawberry.

One of the challenges in growing soft fruit , such as strawberries, raspberries and blackberries, is that it is vulnerable to attack from everything from birds to insects, fungus and moulds, viruses and other diseases, and in order to keep the use of chemical controls at a minimum, we use a system called Integrated Pest Management (IPM).

IPM involves a combination of natural methods and other permitted controls to ensure the plants maintain health and vigour. This may include, for example, using certain insects to act as predators and eat other insects such as aphids or thrips to control them.

The difference between IPM and conventional controls is that there will always be a sustainable population of pests in the field where the cycle of life takes place.

Even spider webs play their part in keeping down the number of harmful flying insects in the crops and the harvesting staff can be seen using brooms to clear the webs in front of them. This indicates a healthy natural environment.

We use both honey bees and bumble bees to help pollinate the crops. When the flowers are open, hives are placed in the fields from which the bees will go out to collect pollen. This needs to be carefully controlled as too many bees can cause damage to the flowers and too few bees can mean poor pollination and misshaped fruit.

New science has it that pollinating bumble bees can also be used to transport fungicidal controls to the flowers in with harming either the bees or the flowers.

David Keeling’s grandparents planted their first strawberries in 1937 and he is the third generation on the farm in St Margaret’s, north County Dublin, which grows 150 million strawberries every year.

INSECT pollinators are critically important to our ecosystems and our wellbeing. Some 80pc of wild plants benefit from pollination by insects and in turn, other animals, plants, fungi and lichen, which are dependent on these plants for food and shelter, benefit too.

As well as the risk of many plants and animals becoming extinct without pollination we, as humans, would also be badly affected. Insect pollination, mainly by bees (but hoverflies help too), is necessary for 75pc of all crops that are used directly for our food.

In fact, the economic value of insect pollination has been estimated to be €153 billion per year globally. In Ireland, bees are worth at least €54 million per year, with €3.9 million of that for the oil-seed rape crop alone. Therefore, we are dependent on insect pollinators, because they ensure that the ecosystems we live in are healthy and robust and provide us with adequate food.

However, pollinators are declining at an alarming rate. There has been widespread loss of wild pollinators in Europe and North America, mainly as a result of agricultural intensification and habitat loss.

In many cases, bees simply have no flowers to visit for food and no safe places to nest because many of the wild places are gone. Of Ireland’s 97 bee species, half have declined in numbers, 30pc are threatened with extinction and three have gone extinct. Domesticated honeybees have also declined by 59pc in the USA and 25pc in Europe.

So what can we do? Well, one thing that needs to be done is that we need to figure out where pollinators can get their food. At the moment we don’t fully know why bees are declining in one part of the country while thriving in another. This means that, if we change how we use the land, we don’t know how this will affect pollinators.

Therefore, I am creating a map – a flower map of Ireland. I’m using a map of different habitat types in Ireland, like grasslands, woodlands, bogs, sand-dunes, urban gardens, etc. and going out to these habitats to count flowers.

By combining this flower information for every habitat with other data about how attractive each flower species is for pollinators (some flowers look nice but don’t have any food for pollinators!) I will create a flower heatmap of Ireland, showing which parts of Ireland are great, or not so great, for pollinators using different shades of the same colour – a bit like a temperature map you’d see on the weather.

This map will help us figure out in which areas of the country pollinators need our help. This will help prevent us from making bad decisions about how we use our land, now and in the future.

HONEY bees not only provide us with delicious honey, they help produce some of our favourite foods through pollination. Pollination is the transfer of pollen from the anther (male part) to the stigma (female part) of flowers. This can be achieved by transport by animals, wind or in water. A wide variety of organisms can act as pollinators, including birds, bats, insects and other mammals, with insects being the most common. Globally, 87 of the leading food crops (accounting for 35pc of the world food production volume) depend on animal pollination.

Bees are most active in summer due to the increase in temperature and forage availability.

Ireland has 97 native bee species: 1 honey bee, 20 bumblebees and 76 solitary species. Six bumblebee and 24 solitary species are threatened with extinction from Ireland due to factors including changing environment, homelessness, hunger, poisoning and sickness.

Solitary bees do not produce honey and as the name suggests they do not live in colonies. When a male and female solitary bee have mated and prepared a nest for their eggs by provisioning it with food for the young bees to feed on, they die. The young bees emerge the following year and the cycle continues.

The honey bee ( Apis mellifera) and the 20 bumblebee species ( Bombus spp.) are social bees. They live in colonies and store honey to feed on when they can’t go out and forage, for example during bad weather, or, in the case of the honeybee, over winter.

The queen of a true bumblebee species hibernates during winter and emerges in the spring to establish a new colony. Once this colony is well established, new queens and males (drones) leave the nest to create new colonies. The males and old queen and workers die off in the autumn/ winter and the new queens hibernate. “Commercially reared colonies” are used in enclosed production systems, such as glasshouses, for pollination services.

Bumblebees produce small quantities of honey compared with the honey bee, and it is not commercially extractable. The honey bee is the most notable managed bee in Ireland and one hive can produce up to 25kg of honey per annum, the majority of which is produced during the summer.

Honey is a natural product produced from the nectar collected mainly from the flowers of living plants. It contains a mixture of sugars, enzymes, minerals, organic acids, polyphenols, proteins, vitamins and other phytochemicals.

The composition and quantity of these components vary according to floral and geographic origin, amongst other factors. Many polyphenols have properties including antioxidant, anti-mutagenic, anti-oestrogenic, carcinogenic and antiinflammatory effects that might potentially be beneficial in preventing disease and protecting the stability of the genome. Reported biological properties of honey include: antibacterial, antidiabetic, anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antioxidant, radical scavenging, and wound and sunburn healing.

My research project is going to determine the bioactive (having an effect upon a living organism, tissue, or cell) properties of Irish honey from both bumblebees and honey bees. This project will enable the development of a typical polyphenol constituent profile for Irish honey.