A Dublin dad has taken up beekeeping with his son as a retirement hobby.
Myles Kelleher and his son Michael began working with bees three years ago in their back garden.
Not only has this brought the pair closer together, they have won awards for their work with the winged insects.
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Michael told Dublin Live: “My dad retired and he didn’t really have anything to do. He kind of needed a hobby and one of my uncles previously kept bees in South Korea so we thought we’d get him some bees.
“We signed up with the local beekeepers association, they did some classes with us and then we eventually got our bees.
“We didn’t keep bees with the aim of winning awards but this year we entered a few competitions in the Fingal beekeepers association. We ended up winning first prize for our honey.”
The Swords man explained how bees are really important as pollinators.
He said: “Without them we wouldn’t have flowers, fruit or vegetables. They’re at threat at the moment because of pesticides but then also global warming is impacting them.
“Bees can tell when to leave the hive by the temperature so as soon as it gets warm, they leave. Plants will only flower at a certain time of the year and if it’s getting hot before the flowers come out, the bees will have nowhere to get their food from and they’ll starve.”
There’s three different types of bees in a hive and they all have different roles that are important for making honey.
“There’s only one queen per hive, so when the new queen comes along she’s known as the virgin queen,” Michael added.
“She’ll do a virgin flight and look for drones. They’ll mate with loads of them, they only ever mate once in their life, they’ll have enough sperm from that mating and that’ll be enough for them to fertilise their eggs for the rest of their lives.
“The queen is big. There’s the worker bee and the drones. The queen lays all the eggs and that’s her only job, she’ll lay thousands. The worker bees nurse after her and keep her happy.
“The worker bees are all female and their job is to collect pollen and nectar and bring it back to the hive. Drones are the only male bees in the hive, they don’t have a stinger. Their job is to mate with the queen.”
Bees are busiest at this time of the year because this is when most of the pollen and nectar from the flowers is coming in.
“At the moment, it’s Spring/ early Summer. We’re doing a hive inspection about once a week. We'll open the hive, go through the frames and see how much honey they have. We see if we can find the queen and see if she’s laying.
“Depending on how full the hive is, we’ll stack another super on top of the hive. There's layers to the hive. As the amount of bees increases, we’ll just stack more on.
“This goes on until the nectar stops flowing towards the end of summer and at that point we’ll take out the frames with the honey and put them into an extractor, spin it out and filter the honey. We’ll put it in jars around August time.
“Then we’ve to get the bees ready for winter so we make sure they’ve enough honey and food to get them through the winter.”
“During the winter the bees will stay in the hive, they won’t do a thing. They’ll come together to stay warm. Every now and then a few bees will fly out just to get some water.
“They’re really busy now but during the winter they won’t be doing much.
“Worker bees typically live two to six weeks and then they’ll die. But during the winter they can live up to six months because they don’t really do anything.”
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