A few years ago, during the first Irish lockdown, I took up beekeeping at our family home in Moyne Park. What began as an attempt to remove a swarm of bees from an outbuilding became a modest experiment in self-sufficiency and has since become one of the great joys of my life in rural Galway.
I was drawn to it partly because the patron saint of bees and beekeepers is the Irish 5th/6th-century saint, St Gobnait, and partly because of a poem I learned at school: WB Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”. Its vision of simplicity and peace left a lasting impression on me, along with a generally positive disposition towards our friends the bees.
