Ballycroy National Park

Yesterday I took Maureen and Monika, two friends from the OWLs who are staying in the Folly, for a visit to Ballycroy, the Ballycroy National Park and Visitors Center. There I asked the staff if they were thinking about getting bees. No, but they will have a talk the first half of August by a beekeeper from Westport. When we came back I saw that Timothy the beekeeper had put another storey on one of the hives. A sign that things are going well with the Polranny Pirate Bees! I asked Timothy and he answered this: ‘The bees seem to be growing well. They also have adequate stores which is encouraging as this time of the year is usually an issue. I think clover might be a bit early and sycamore which is all but finished certainly was late. The Visitor Centre is a nice spot. It’s probably Henry Horkan who’ll give the talk. Well worth a listen if you are interested he is quite knowledgeable.’

Bellagorick

Once upon a time Ireland went for self-suffiency. That’s how it came about that the first and only electric power-plant running on turf was build on the massive bogs of the North Mayo plane. One could see it from miles around. A village with a post office, a pub, a shop and several houses had been build around the plant. You don’t see them in the drawing because they are in the valley where the river runs through that provided the power station with cooling water. It was a welcome stop in the middle of the nothingness of the immense bog. Was it a venerated landmark or an eyesore? Was is progress or folly? To me it was all of the above. But then Ireland became part of the big global economy and the use of turf as fuel was laughed at: too expensive, too labour intensive. Oil now, that was the thing. The drawing was made during the hot summer of 1983. I remember sitting by the side of the road, sketching at full speed being pestered by horseflies. One day they tore down the power station. A big bang and it crumbled. By then the post office was closed, followed by the shop and the pub. Most of the village stands empty. There is a wind-power park to the north of Bellagorick now because the already existing electric grid is at hand. Why this post on a blog about bees? Timothy’s colleague Jude from the Westport Beekeepers Association gave the excuse. He keeps a lot of hives up that way. Lovely heather honey no doubt.

Meanwhile back in Achill

Yesterday Timothy swung by accompanied by Jude a colleague from the Westport Beekeepers Association. They had been replacing an aggressive colony at Achill Secret Garden with a more docile one. The hive now gets a new residence in Glenhest far from the madding crowd. Timothy also had installed a starter hive at Sheila McHugh in BullsMouth (another colleague of mine from the Achill Writers Group). He has now four and possibly five addresses in Achill of which three on Achill. That means that we will get our own ‘run’ in the future. Now Timothy gets in later and later because he has so much to do before Achill. Yesterday it was nine at night. The bees were grumpy and the midges out in full force. Still, the second hive has a honey box now too. The stores were sufficient and things were generally going well. One of the bee’s favourite summer flower is in bloom: white clover. The picture shows the first ones but soon the garden was covered… till Mike Wilson came yesterday to cut the grass. But there are still plenty left. The most enthralling ode to white clover is in Soma Morgenstern’s ‘In einer anderen Zeit’. If you read German it is well worth the effort. I found it ‘unputdownable’.It's in the library of the Polranny Pirates.

Queen Cups

The worker bees had been busy with the succession to the hive’s crown. Apart from the queen cell we also discovered several queen cups. The incumbent queen didn’t lay any eggs in these. A friend told me this morning that her mother, Mrs Feldbrugge from Zuidhorn in Holland, had six beehives in the back of her garden. A beekeeper put them in for her, just like Timothy Stevens did for the Polranny Pirates. But after a while she got very interested, followed a course in beekeeping and from then on took care of them herself. I’m sure I won’t go that far… Unlike Timothy she wasn’t keen on swarming. Too much trouble with the neighbours in the village when they were visited by an unwelcome swarm. She destroyed any queen cup and cell she found on a frame.

Corraun Mountain a mating site?

Once on a summer day I climbed Corraun Mountian. I started out from the northeast where the lonely little lakes hug the steep incline to the top. It’s a quietly beautiful but slightly creepy place that the sun only reaches very early on a cloudless day in high summer. When I climbed the top of the mountain was out of sight all the time so I didn’t really know where I would end up. Finally I came to a shoulder north from the top. It was so steep I crawled on all fours. On the last bit a lovely sweet smell reached my nose. It must have been the heather that was in bloom. Around me circled an enormous amount of bees. Where did they come from? There were only two beekeepers on the peninsula and one was my neighbour in Polranny and the other an old man in Owenduff Tonragee; both miles away. When I told the story to Timothy the beekeeper he was very interested. It might have been one of the elusive drone congregation areas, he reckoned. The drawing of Corraun Mountain was made from the north or Belfarset side.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

I was away staying with friends in the Burren. When I came back after a mere five days, not only did the County Council in name of the Irish Water Board install a water meter next to the gate to the Polranny Pirates hideaway, but Timothy the beekeeper had also put an extra storey on one of the starter hives. You can never lift your heels for a second without the world you left behind changing completely. I missed out on all the fun! Now I have to wait for the first water bill in a long time to be put into the mailbox and Timothy to come back to do the second hive.

Drones

The world of bees in which I submerge myself is getting more interesting but also more unsettling each time I look into a new phenomenon. This time it is drones, the male bee. They are born out of unfertilized eggs and do not work. Their sole purpose is to mate the queen. The fate of drones is that they either die after mating or are forced to leave the hive in the winter. To prevent inbreeding drones don’t mate the resident queen but go to a collective destination with all other drones from up to 200 different hives. There the drones wait for the virgin queens to arrive. A bit like the old Irish ‘dancing in the crossroads’ where the young men of the different villages gathered, some of them with a penny whistle or a violin or a uilleann pipe and wait for the girls to turn up to dancing and courting with. The drones visit more than one mating site and if they do not strike lucky they have to go all the way back to the hive for refueling. As there are many more drones than queens and even thou the queen mates more than once, there are still plenty of drones that don’t get laid. The same congregation areas are used year after year and as new inexperienced drones arrive every year the place must be clearly signposted in bee-speak but unseen and unheard of by humans.

Putting up the sheep fence

During the rest of the month of April it was very peaceful around the starter hives. The weather that had been beautiful and summerlike changed for the worse. On the very last day of April Timothy drove up again with Amanda and a very small blue-eyed sheepdog puppy. They had just been to Achill where Timothy had put two starter hives at Achill Secret Garden (not four as I have posted; the Styrofoam hives had not been emptied yet into the wooden hives) where Amanda had been stung on the forehead. They had also inspected a promising site at Saula. Timothy was going to put the sheep wire up and change the Styrofoam hive into a wooden one.

Bees in Achill Secret Garden

As honey source is the ultimate condition for keeping bees Achill Secret Garden is the place to be. On the last day of April on their daughter’s thirties birthday Timothy the beekeeper installed no less than 4 starter hives in the seaside garden of Pirate’s friends Doutsje and Willem. The garden with all its flowering plants and shrubs is a haven for hungry honey bees. Doutsje and Willem improved and beautified an existing hundred year old seaside garden on the east coast of Achill Island. Since 1967 they have been working non-stop to make this garden the pride of the island. During the past winter they have cleared a section where wind damaged trees darkened the ground. Timothy chose this place for his beehives. It is far from the house and the visitor’s route through the garden.

Quiet is a beguiling word

All looked wonderful with the sun shining and the bees a-buzzing. The sheep were safely put behind bars and forgotten. The next upset came from Facebook of all places. That happens when you make a blog and link the blog to FB every now and then. Lilian Voshaar a Polranny Pirates’ friend and environmental activist in the Amsterdam district called De Pijp wrote: ‘I wonder if there is enough to eat for the bees through the year. Here we try to make the best of it by advising different plants for different seasons to accommodate insects.’ To which Timothy Stevens the beekeeper answered: ‘I shall be keeping a very close eye on stores for the bees. I am not certain that there will be forage in the height of the summer in Polranny and June may prove troublesome. This is one of the main reasons that I have only installed two hives to see if the location can stand that and if it can I shall increase the number. From late this month the hives will be seen every week and inspected every two. I also intend to pay close attention to the pollen coming into these hives and others I have placed close by to see what the bees are foraging on.’ Well! Never a dull day!

A home for abandoned shrubs

Every now and than kind people give flowering shrubs to the Polranny Pirates to embellish the garden. Unfortunately they usually are put somewhere to be dealt with later and then forgotten. Sad really. But now I had an idea: I would put flowering shrubs along the screen that stands in front of the beehives. There were four abandoned shrubs in different stages of pitiful to be put to use. I put them in but they hardly made an impact. Next I went begging for sad shrubs with my friends of Achill Secret Garden. They gave me another six orphaned shrubeens that were on the verge of very sad. Now there is a start of a kind of hedge along the screen. That is if nothing dies on me.

In the Green Zone

The hives were now neatly tied up and weighted down with a rock. As an extra precaution Timothy the beekeeper said that when he was coming back he was going to put a sheep wire fence around the hives making it a kind of compound where no terrorist sheep could penetrate; a bit like the Green Zone in Bagdad. The next day the damaging sheep had disappeared. Later I was told by Polranny Pirates’ friend Annie Masterson that Johnny her grandson and Michael, Peggy’s son had moved the offending sheep quietly like, under the cloak of the night back to the pen where they belonged. After that all seemed quiet on the western front.

Damaging sheep

The next morning I was in total despair. Over night the sheep of neighbour Peggy , foraging for food away from home, had dislodged one of the hives. Part of the inside of the hive was exposed and bees were flying around angry and disoriented. I called Timothy’s mother as I didn’t have his phone number, to ask if she could tell him that there was an emergency. Then I got into the car to get Peggy and drag her to the scene of the crime to get her sheep sorted. But Peggy was nowhere to be found, probably hiding under the bed as soon as she saw my red car racing up the driveway.

The Queen gets her wings clipped

Timothy the Beekeeper took out a pair of old fashioned bended nail scissors and clipped the queen’s wings. ‘Now she cannot fly anymore. When another new queen gets born and this one leaves the hive to swarm she won’t get very far,’ he grinned. Our neighbour had bees and once one of his queens followed by a swarm landed with us. We weren’t home at the time and before my neighbour had located the errant queen, she had established herself under the roof of the porch, between the ceiling and the roof covering. He never managed to get her out and for years when it got hot in the summer we could smell the honey.(photo Amanda Stevens)