Training and low set-up costs… so you won’t get stung
Whatever about the bees, at least you won’t get stung on the cost of setting up your apiary, as hive clusters are called.
Irish beekeepers associations ensure there’s plenty of guidance for beginners and it doesn’t cost that much to get started.
A beginners’ kit costs from €300, including a suit with the distinctive beekeeper’s hood, plus tools, a smoker and a hive… but no bees.
‘We’d advise people to do a course with their local club or association to see do they like handling bees,’ said Jim Carroll of Irish Bee Supplies in Ardee, Co. Louth.
‘We’d have around 130 members in Dundalk yet we get 30-35 new members every year. Some would get to know how to do their beekeeping and then drop out.
‘A club in Meath was getting 80 to 90 new members year and had to cap membership because demand was so strong and they don’t have facilities to train them all.’
The six-week training courses tend to go on over the winter, so now is good time to put your name down.
‘There’s quite a lot to learn but it’s very satisfying and even addictive,’ he says.
‘It gets you into biodiversity and food quality. It’s also very gratifying.
‘You could sit on chair watching your bees going in and out with different colours of pollen all day.’ Mr Carroll advises budding beekeepers to buy native bees from their local club.
‘That way they are 100% checked for diseases.
To start off, you get starter hive which is called a ‘nuc’ – short for nucleus – for around €180, which includes 10-15,000 bees and a queen.
With queens laying 1,500-2,000 eggs a day, this soon turns into a fully-fledged hive buzzing with 40-60,000 bees.
Liam McGarry has been a beekeeper for nearly 50 years and now lives in Shankill in south Co. Dublin.
He keeps bees on a former allotment and in the garden of a large house, whose owner likes having them around to pollinate her flowers. Some years, he brings the bees up into the mountains to make prized heather honey – which has been shown to have very high healthgiving properties in a recent report by Trinity College.
‘It tastes better and sets like a jelly that has to be crushed out of the frames.’
You don’t have to go up the mountains, however.
‘You could even start an apiary in your back garden,’ he says. But what about the neighbours?
‘They wouldn’t even notice. Bees fly two and a half miles from the hive at a height of 2030ft.
‘If you’re working with the hive, they might get a bit narky. But I wouldn’t work the bees on a sunny day when everyone is
out in their bikinis!’
Bees do swarm when hives get overcrowded but good beekeepers will be aware of the problem and will split the hive before this happens.
Even if they do notice the bees, neighbours – not to mention friends and family – will soon be brought onside with a free jar of delicious honey, he says.
Does he get stung himself? ‘Every time! But I get used to it.’
Although a honey bee produces just a teaspoon of honey in a lifetime – that’s three to six weeks in the summer – hives are quite productive. ‘If managed well, a hive makes 60-90 pounds of honey [per year].
‘This summer by all accounts, thanks to the heatwave, the average is well above those figures,’ he says.
Most beekeepers are smallscale hobbyists with two to five hives.
But a growing band of enterprising apiarists – particularly retirees – have from 30 to over 100 hives and can make a little extra income by packaging and selling their own honey brand.
For beginners, that’s not recommended.
But Mr McGarry suggests getting at least two hives to start with to make the effort worthwhile.