Cloudforest Two has a new family!
We’re delighted that over the weekend, Cloudforest Two in Carrigaholt, Co. Clare became home to our newest conservation area for NIHBS as they work tirelessly to preserve and protect the native Irish honeybee.
NIHBS focus on conservation of the Irish honeybee population, because the Irish honeybee is adapted to better cope with the wet, cool Irish weather than imported bees. With imported bees bringing imported diseases, as well as crossbreeding between the Irish subspecies and the non-native imports, every monitored population helps protect our native honeybee.
However, we understand there’s concern around the overemphasis of honeybees as pollinators, and we get it. That’s why our forests are used for safe zones for the NIHBS conservation programme, and not for revenue from honey production. Based on this site’s capability to support the population while preventing competition with the wild bee population and other pollinators on this site, we’re only introducing a single honeybee hive, and we’ll be ‘buzzy’ monitoring its progress throughout the summer.
NIHBS beekeeper Aideen Day sent us this video update taken just after she settled the girls into their new home. They’ll take a few days to map their new location, and Aideen will help them transfer from their temporary transport box into their new hive over the coming days. Many of our CoolPartners met Aideen (and this very beehive!) at our recent community planting day, where she kindly demonstrated how this type of hive worked.
Our latest Cloudforest Two residents
Leaving their transport box to explore their new home
It’s great to see the young Alders growing healthily just behind the hive. Alder produces a lot of pollen early in the season, which is very important for bees when there’s little else flowering. And with it being such a young forest, there’s also a huge amount of wildflowers and foraging available on the ground for the honeybees, as well as the surrounding hedgerows and fields.
Cloudforest Two is quite a wet site, and unfortunately the location wasn’t permitted for only native Irish species - so we planted it with a mixture of 3,200 Alder and Spruce during the 2022/23 season. Sitka spruce plays an important role in cooling our planet - because it grows so quickly, it’s awesome at carbon sequestration. But to prevent the biodiversity desert that so often occurs in spruce plantations, we also planted a lot of Alder mixed in throughout this forest - not just around the edges.
Even though the forest is newly planted, we’ve an eye to the future. We’ll be managing this site carefully using continuous cover forestry methods to maximise the nature value within it. Improving our hedgerows and promoting diversity in the plants growing in the understory of the forest floor will be the main focus for our future #LoveNature projects on this site, as we will work to increase the amount and variety of flowering species growing in the hedges and, as it grows, under the forest canopy.
You can read more about the work we’re doing with NIHBS here.
Stay tuned!
