HAVE YOU NOTICED an absence of buzzing in the back garden the past few weeks? You are not the only one.

A handful of letters to the Irish Times were published at the beginning of the month, detailing the concerns of some citizens pertaining to the perceived absence of bees in June.

“I have not seen a single bee this summer. This seems to reflect an ongoing neglect of pollinator habitats. It’s very sad,” wrote one contributor from Waterford, while another pointed out that while bees were appearing in his garden, “neighbours with paved-over gardens have none”. 

According to several beekeepers in Ireland, trends in the weather over the last year have contributed to a difficult situation for Ireland’s bee population.

Ken Norton, Secretary of the Federation of Irish Beekeepers Associations, spoke to The Journal about acute factors that have presented challenges for Irish bees in the past year.

Norton, who has been keeping bees on land in Westmeath for 25 years, said: “Beekeeping is exactly like farming, extremely weather-dependent. Bees don’t have umbrellas. They don’t like to fly in the rain.” 

Norton also suggested that industrialisation has played a roll and caused bees to spend less time in areas where conditions are less favourable. 

“If a motorway or industrial estate, or a big supermarket, is built, the bee population will move on. I don’t see it as a decline, but the bees make their own decisions about where to go.” The National Biodiversity Data Centre similarly points to habitat loss as a major factor in a 14.2% decline in abundance between 2015 and 2020.

Eleanor Attridge of the Co Cork Beekeepers Association also attributed lower bee levels this summer to the recent trends in the weather, citing the effects of rainfall on Irish flowers.

“It’s totally dependent on last year’s weather, and if you think about last year’s weather it started pouring rain in June and continued for the rest of the summer,” Attridge, who has been keeping bees in Cork for 12 years, said.

“The minute it starts raining it washes the pollen out of the flowers so they wouldn’t have the pollen reserves to build up the colonies or to provision the nests for this year’s pollinators… So there’s bound to be a decline in pollinators this year as a result.”

As for what we can expect for the bees in 2025, Attridge says it depends on what happens with the weather “from now onwards”.

“If you stop and think about the lifecycle of your queen wasp or your queen bumblebee, they will be laid up  and fed towards the end of August. Any queens that got mated in 2023 have been replaced now and the bees only do that when they know there’s a problem.”

Both Attridge and Norton, however, have pointed to other factors that have improved the situation for bees in Ireland. 

“Some local authorities have been proactive in installing wildflower meadows, replacing vibrant flowers at roundabouts with flowers that are more friendly to the bees.

“They’re making provisions for pollinators at the edges of the roads in order to bring biodiversity back, so I would say in the last 15 years there has been an improvement in the bee population,” Attridge says. 

“If you went for a drive 30 or 40 years ago, the windscreen of your car would be covered in flies. That went away for a long time, but that’s starting to happen again. That tells me that the pollinators are improving in numbers.”

While casual observers may be more likely to notice a year-on-year change in the number of bees in their garden, the picture for Ireland’s bee population since the early 1980s has been a stark one.

The National Biodiversity Data Centre (NBDC) has reported that: “More than half of Ireland’s bee species have undergone substantial declines in their numbers since 1980.  The distribution of 42 species has declined by more than 50%.”

Sunny weather for the rest of the summer would help Ireland’s bees to thrive year-on-year, but due to the severe reduction in food available to bees, one-third remain threatened with extinction in Ireland. 

Norton says that it’s important for Ireland to transition back towards wildflower meadows in public spaces rather than opting for colourful displays of non-native flowers, which do very little for pollinators. Norton noted that “there are no vibrant flowers which are in-season 12 months of year, so we rely on non-native species that are no use to the pollinators.”

Attridge pointed to work undertaken by local authorities under the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan. The plan is tasked with reversing the decline in Ireland’s bee population, and its most recent five-year strategy notes that 55% of local authorities and 278 businesses have partnered with the plan to “start a process of widespread change to land management to better support pollinators and other biodiversity”.