Caring for bees

Bees are an essential part of our everyday environment. They are responsible for pollinating many commercial food crops and native plants in Ireland. The number of our native bees has been falling recently. Find out how you can help boost their survival rates by providing plants for them to feed on and places for them to shelter.

Why do bees need help?

The honeybee's role in pollinating plants is estimated to be worth between £120 and £200 million a year to farmers in the UK. In the past two years the honeybee population has been badly hit. Numbers of honeybees have dropped by 10 to 15 per cent due to bad weather, and infection from pests and diseases. There are 101 bee species in Ireland. Nineteen of these species are bumblebees, and more than half of these bumblebee species are in decline, for example: the endangered Great Yellow Bumblebee (Bombus distinguendus).

How you can help bees?

There are a number of things you can do to help protect bees, from providing them with food and shelter in your garden, using pesticides responsibly and beekeeping.

Providing food

Bees need a wide range of plants that flower from spring to autumn to feed from:

Alyssum, Cornflower, Sunflower, Michaelmas Daisy and Sweet William for nectar in summer
Bluebells, Rosemary, Geranium and Honeysuckle
Ivy and shrub Willows provide food in early and late parts of the year

Creating shelters for bumble bees

Bumble bees need to find places to nest and overwinter. You can help them by:

creating patches of bare earth in warm sheltered spaces for nesting sites
leaving a pile of stones, dead plants stems, fallen leaves and log piles for bumble bees to hibernate in over winter
buying a ready-made bumble bee box

Pesticide use

Misuse of pesticides can affect bees. You can help them by:

considering natural alternatives (for example: planting onion, garlic, or marigolds).
if you feel you need to use them, only spray in the early morning or evening when the bees and other insects will be less active.
always store in a secure, cool and dry place.

Types of Bees

Honeybee

The type of bee that most people will be familiar with. We have only one native species of honeybee in Ireland. Keeping bees is a popular pastime with over 3,700 beekeepers in the whole of Ireland. In the wild they make their nests in hollow trees.

Bumblebee

The type you will find in your back garden or your local park. Each species is identified by the pattern on their body (thorax) and ‘tail’ (abdomen). There are 13 species of True bumblebees and six species of Cuckoo bumblebees.

Solitary Bees

The type most people won’t be familiar with and often found in sand dunes. These make up most of the 81 other types of bee found here, most are a lot smaller and not furry like bumblebees.

Bumblebees

Bumblebees and honeybees are highly social insects. They live in large colonies consisting of a queen, many female worker bees (which tend the young and defend the colony) and some male bees.

Queen bees will hibernate all winter and emerge in spring to find a new nest (often an old mouse nest), where the fertilized eggs become female workers and the unfertilized eggs become males. These will then go off to mate with a new queen and start a new colony.

Bumblebees are very important pollinators; some are used commercially to pollinate greenhouse tomatoes and peppers. They transfer the pollen from one flower to the next by collecting it on their hairs ‘fur.’

Bumblebees do not swarm and are not aggressive like some wasps can be, unless you disturb their colony. However the female workers can sting you twice, unlike honeybees which die after losing their sting.

Commonly seen are the White Tailed Bumblebee and the Common Carder Bumblebee. Look out for the slightly rarer Red Tailed Bumblebee.

The decline in some species is due mainly to habitat loss to farming, forest and housing developments. Habitat fragmentation is where the bee has too far to travel to the next area of wildflower rich grassland or meadow. For a species with already low numbers, this can sometimes mean that the bees will not have sufficient numbers to breed with and the potential of inbreeding.

Changes in our weather and climate change could have a devastating effect on some bee populations where they are not able to adapt to an increase in the number of wet days per year or the rapid change and loss of specific habitats.