World Bee Day
Today is World Bee Day, a day to celebrate the vital role bees play in keeping our world alive. 🐝🐝🐝 Without bees, we wouldn't enjoy many of the food crops we rely on.
In Cloudforests, we work with the NIHBS Native Irish Honeybee Society to conserve the Irish population of honeybee, under threat from hybridisation and disease due to the import of European bees. Our Cloudforest sites provide special protection areas where their keepers can work to safely increase the native Irish honeybee numbers for transport around the country, working to reduce the number of imported honeybees.
It's important to us that our beekeepers do their conservation work without causing harm to the other resident bee populations. While we all know and love the honeybee, did you know there are approximately 100 species of bees in Ireland? Aside from the honeybee, there are currently 22 species of bumblebee and 78 species of solitary bee, although some are rare or unrecorded in recent years. Each bee species has slightly different needs, and fill slightly different niches within the ecosystem - targeting different plants, and storing food and making their homes in different ways.
In Cloudforests, we look to create and preserve different types of habitats on our sites, to accommodate the needs of all of the species - and we keep our honeybee hive numbers low, to prevent competition between the wild bees and the honeybees. We leave wild areas and exposed earth banks for nesting, create orchards and wildflower meadows, and plant native Irish trees that provide a range of flower nectar throughout the year. On Cloudforest One, our amazing beekeeper Hergen Bayer builds his own hives using sustainable methods and reclaimed materials.
#biodiversity #nativeirishhoneybee #pollinators #natureisbeautiful #protectnature #ServeNature #wildbees
