Helping Bees from at home: Winter flowering plants

Winter can be a tough time for bees. There is often little forage available and in times gone by this has suited the bees who will form a tight cluster in the hive (much like penguins do!) to save their honey reserves. However, with our recent milder autumns and winters, the bees are active for longer in the season, this can mean that they use more honey than they traditionally would have. It's great, therefore, to provide them with a few varieties of plants that flower during the winter months. See a few options for your garden below:

- Hellebores - Open-faced, single flowers give easy access to nectar and pollen. 
- Willows - Honey bee on goat willow (Salix caprea) 
- Crocuses - Early crocus (Crocus tommasinianus) is easy to grow, even in your lawn. 
- Mahonias - Mahonia 'Charity' is hardy and colourful.

You can find more ideas here. 

Valentine's Day Gift Box

Some honey for your honey?! Pick it up here.

This is a lovely gift set for your Valentine, comprising, honey, dried flowers, a honey dipper and beautiful hand rolled beeswax candles, chocolates and more! This gift includes the sponsorship of a queen bee in the coming 2022 season! You can name the queen and we will include the certificate in your gift box! Make sure you show your Valentine how much you care.

Included in the gift set

  • Raw Irish Honey 227g

  • 2x hand-rolled beeswax candles

  • Queen naming certificate

  • Dried lavender

  • Native Irish wildflower seed-bombs

  • 2 bars of Bean & Goose chocolate

  • Hand turned honey dipper (made in The Yard social enterprise in Dublin 8)

  • Wooden Hearts

Last day of shipping is the 10th of February to ensure your pack arrives on time!

Ecological mismatch

Worried scientists in the UK are reporting that plants are flowering up to a month earlier than they should due to climate change. This can cause “ecological mismatch” - a concept that refers to the consequences of climate change to the environment. If plants continue to flower early there would be knock on effects for many other parts of our ecosystems, including the foraging honeybees.

Volunteer with OpenHive

Beekeeping is one of the oldest forms of agriculture. For thousands of years people have been passing on this skill to others. It can take years to learn all that is needed to keep bees proficiently. But every experienced beekeeper had to start at the beginning. It can be daunting to start out on this journey, which is why we take on a volunteer team each year. We give people the skills and confidence to keep their own bees.

Each year we take on a small group of volunteers. Education forms a huge part of what we do at OpenHive and we really enjoy teaching like-minded people the skills we have picked up as beekeepers over the years. There is a lot of hard work involved but we feel like there is a huge amount to gain as a result.

If you are interested please apply before January 31st via this link: https://www.openhive.ie/volunteers

Happy Holidays & Thank You!

We are going to take a short but well earned break for the holidays. Thank you all so much for your support. It has been a wonderful year for us and for our bees. Without the support of our OpenHive community we wouldn’t be where we are now and we a re hugely grateful for that. Enjoy the holidays!

Kyle, Mark, Jack & the OpenHive crew.

Where is your honey actually from?

A fascinating article detailing a long-time issue. So little is known about the origin of the cheap honeys on the shelves in almost every shop near you. Shopping directly from the beekeepers (or reading the labels closely and buying accordingly) will give you a more ethical/sustainable product as well as a tastier honey. We recommend OpenHive honey, naturally, but there are many other excellent local honeys to try. Don’t be scared off by the prices of a high quality local product vs. a blended, sweetened mixture from overseas…

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/nov/28/bee-aware-do-you-know-what-is-in-that-cheap-jar-of-honey?

New Stockists!

Exciting news - you can now find our delicious raw Irish honey in a few more stores around Dublin. We’ve added Bear Market Coffee and 64 Wine to our roster of stockists. Please see below for the full list!

OpenHive Christmas Gift Boxes

We are delighted to launch our Christmas range - a personalised Christmas gift box containing our delicious raw Irish honey, two hand-rolled Irish beeswax candles, a hand turned beech wood honey dipper, native Irish wildflower seed bombs and two bars of artisan Bean and Goose chocolate. Each box is laser engraved to personalise it with a name of your choice.

Each gift comes with an exclusive queen rearing certificate. The recipient has the opportunity to name a new queen being reared in 2022. Each queen will go on to reign over a colony of roughly 50,000 native Irish honey bees by mid summer 2022. This is a Christmas gift that not only is a wonderful gift, it will help our native Irish honeybees to thrive. See our web store for more info: https://www.openhive.ie/shop/christmas-gift-box

Honeybees & social distancing

A fascinating article in the Guardian over the weekend that describes how bees know to change their patterns of food distribution and grooming based on how much Varroa was present in the hive. Strange times we face at the moment, but none too surprised to see that the honey bees are one step ahead of us when it comes to dealing with a threat using their intelligence and instinct!

Cut comb heather honey is here!

We are very, very excited to offer cut comb honey for sale for the first time here at OpenHive. Not only that but it is Heather honey. We love heather honey, and it’s a real delicacy. The heather in the Wicklow mountains only flowers for roughly 2-3 weeks per year so its always very reliant on getting good weather for that window. Thankfully this year we had a great harvest and are really proud of this delicious honey.

Heather honey been recently studied by Trinity and UCD (2018) to show it is comparable to Manuka honey. Ours comes from Wicklow and was harvested in the late summer.

Extracting this delicacy requires a lot more work than regular honey. Each year we move the hives up to the heather when it begins to flower. Heather is generally located in remote areas of the mountains which can be difficult to access. The honey is also known as a thixotropic honey, meaning it is like a gel rather than a liquid, and therefore, can not be spun out like regular honey.

You can order it here - enjoy!

NIHBS Book

The Native Irish Honey Bee Society (NIHBS) was established in November 2012 by a group of beekeepers who wished to support the various strains of the native Irish honey bee (Apis mellifera mellifera) throughout the country. It is a cross-border organisation, open to all, that consists of members and representatives from all corners of the island of Ireland.

We are proud members of NIHBS and have really enjoyed the information we have learned from the society and the contacts we have made as well. Recently NIHBS produced a wonderful book about our native honeybee that we are very much enjoying reading. The attention to detail and had work gone into the book is very impressive. Well done to all involved!

Buy the book: https://nihbs.org/product/the-native-irish-honey-bee/

Visit the NIHBS Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NIHBS/ or the website: https://nihbs.org/

TED Talk: Marla Spivak: Why Bees Are Disappearing

By no means a new talk, or indeed packed with ground-breaking suggestions, it remains a very worthwhile, well presented and easy-to-watch introduction to how people can help bees. This 15min TED Talk sees Marla Spivak (an American entomologist) explain what has been happening to bees and that the future is not without hope. We enjoyed it and thought that you might too.

Every one of you out there can help bees in two very direct and easy ways. Plant bee-friendly flowers, and don't contaminate these flowers, this bee food, with pesticides.

https://www.ted.com/talks/marla_spivak_why_bees_are_disappearing

Want to be happier? Connect with nature!

One of the main reasons we do what we do here at OpenHive is to spend time in nature allowing us to relax (even in the face of bees!), to focus on the tasks at hand and to get away from the demands of everyday life. We often see beekeeping as a form of mediation/therapy for us, much like most beekeepers up and down the country. Well, it now seems like the newspaper columns agree with us too!

In yesterday’s Independent we read:

Last year researchers using data from the 2012 European Quality of Life Survey released the findings of a study looking at the link between Europeans’ happiness and the species diversity in their surroundings.

“It showed that the happiest Europeans are those who see the most bird species in their day-to-day life,” said Patrick Croke, technical officer at Connecting to Nature.

“Being connected with nature, rather than simply being exposed to it, is about feeling close to the wider natural world and is more important for our mental wellbeing.”

Connecting to Nature: https://connectingtonature.ie/

Read more: https://www.independent.ie/breaking-news/irish-news/birds-and-bees-secret-weapons-to-raising-happiness-levels-40865669.html

Swarm season!

We are currently in swarm season - May and June being the primary months for this wonderful natural phenomenon. We get calls every year from lots of different people to come and help rehouse swarms. One such swarm is in the picture below. The bees are extremely docile when swarming, contrary to popular belief, and very rarely sting when on the move en masse like this. They will often stop mid-move to rest as the scout bees look for a suitable new home. This is what is happening in the photo. We gently assisted them into a nuc and they are now well-fed and cosy in their latest home!

OpenHive Seed Bombs are back!

Our Irish wildflower seed bombs are back in stock! You can pick them up here.

Each packet of Seed Bombs contains hundreds of seeds and 18 species of native wildflowers. The seeds are mixed with locally sourced, unfortified soil. The clay supports and protects the seeds whilst they germinate and spreads them as it breaks down after watering.

Seed balls are an ancient method of farming that is less destructive to the wildlife buried in your garden, less labour intensive and increases germination rates. Used throughout the world for hundreds of years, we are now using this ingenious method to help bees, and other pollinators!

Bees.jpeg

First Asian Hornet found in Ireland

Over the weekend the first confirmed sighting of the Asian Hornet in Ireland was recorded in Dublin where a dying hornet was found. This has sent a frisson of fear and worry through beekeeping circles, naturally enough, given the hornets’ ability to destroy colonies of honeybees.

A combination of size, aggression, large numbers, speed of travel and adaptability make the Asian hornet quite the predator. That said, there are many questions to be asked regarding the find - was it a queen? How did it get there? Where was it found? And so on. The arrival of the Asian hornet from UK/France/further afield is inevitable - how we deal with its arrival will be very important to beekeepers across the country.

Here is how to identify it: