Northern Ireland Bee Industry

Bees contribute to the sustainability of the countryside, through their crucial role of pollinating flowers contributing to agriculture, horticulture and biodiversity.

The main pollinator the European honeybee (Apis mellifera) is suitable for outdoor fruit crops such as the apple orchards and field crops such as oil seed rape. They also produce honey and other hive products, which are the great incentives for beekeepers to manage and maintain colonies in hives. The role the honeybee plays in ensuring the diversity of Northern Ireland's flora and fauna from managed and feral colonies cannot be over emphasised. Growers of protected crops such as strawberries have traditionally used commercially reared species of bumblebee (Bombus) to improve pollination of their crops.

There are thought to be some 1,000 beekeepers in N. Ireland who maintain around 4,000 colonies of honeybees. These are mainly small-scale beekeepers, many of which are members of local beekeeping associations. DARD provides support for the beekeeping sector in N. Ireland through it’s inspection service delivered by Quality Assurance Branch (QAB), education programmes coordinated by the College of Agriculture, Food and Rural Enterprise (CAFRE) and disease diagnostics from the Agri-food and Biosciences Institute (AFBI).

The full extent of services provided by CAFRE and AFBI can found by ounf on their websites.  Further information can be found on local beekeeping issues from the external websites of the  Ulster Beekeepers Association (UBKA) and The Institute of Northern Ireland Beekeepers

Please note that these links are to a non Department of Agriculture and Rural Development site.

We are not responsible for the content or reliability of the linked websites. Listing should not be taken as endorsement of any kind. We cannot guarantee that the link will work all the time and we have no control over the availability of linked pages.