Mary Seery Kearney (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and all our beekeepers and scientists. I apologise because I was in committee and could not come to the presentation this morning.

It is my great honour to have been invited by Senator Martin to be a co-signatory of this Bill. On the day I received his email, it brought me back to being a child. I have beekeepers in my family. I do not claim to know anything about beekeeping except having been a child standing and watching my family members as beekeepers. I always visit the stand at Bloom with an ambition to do this at some point when I do the courses and learn what I should be doing.

When I got the email, I reached out to family members to ask if this was something we needed. I also wondered how many beehives there are in my constituency of Dublin South-Central. I had the great honour of connecting with Austin Campbell of the Robert Emmet Community Development Project. Here today we have Anthony Freeman O'Brien, who is the manager of Bee 8, which has two projects with 100 hives. It has gone further and has a community development project that has partnered with the Digital Hub to put sensors on bees to monitor air pollution in the area. Even in Dublin city, we have that ability. I asked their advice regarding the Bill and they came back and said they absolutely supported it and asked if we could look at moving away from a reliance on honey-related revenue towards charging urban businesses to engage in a hive management model that would allow the likes of the Robert Emmet Community Development Project to provide local employment opportunities and enhance the urban environment. There are opportunities with this.

I asked the beekeepers in my family and those I know to put this in layman's terms for me. The people who speak a lot in this Seanad are terribly impressive but also intimidating to engage with because I would never have the language to be able to engage with somebody who speaks with such great authority.The feedback, for those of us who are lay people and know nothing, was that the native black bee was the only bee suited to our climate. It has survived and thrived. Currently, there is no ban on importing bees. If someone wanted Buckfast or Italian bees, in order to have a tamer bee, the difficulty is that over time, bees inter-breed and this means that the hybrid bee is not able to adapt to the environment, humidity or rain and the colony starves and dies off. It is rather challenging to keep a colony going through the summer to harvest time and even more so over winter. By not acting to protect what we have, we are significantly contributing to the destruction of our native bee stock. Absolutely anything and everything necessary to support native bees should be enshrined in legislation as soon as humanly possible. That is provided that we plan on human beings being around a whole lot longer. That sums it up in an incredible way.

Those of us who are not beekeepers do not think about temperament. From a temperament point of view, another beekeeper contacted me to say that the beekeeper's experience of having hybrid bees was that they were incredibly aggressive. When replaced with a native bee queen, peace now reigns in the garden and it is safe for that beekeeper's grandchildren to come to visit.

It is my honour as a lay outsider to know that fundamentally we need to support our native bee. I plant particular flowers in the garden to ensure that I am supporting the bees in the way in which I am familiar. I thank Senator Martin and the Climate Bar Association for all the work it did with him. I thank him for the opportunity to support this. I will enjoy and relish the experience of learning as we go through this. I am looking forward to going out to Bee 8 this summer to annoy Anthony Freeman O'Brien with a load of questions and enjoying that. I embrace the fact that here in the city we can keep bees. It is not the preserve of any one quarter. We should be doing this everywhere. Why not?