Competition

In 2015, Trinity College Dublin became home to a research hive of honeybees and we asked the public to help us name the queen for a chance to win a copy of DK’s “The Bee Book”  a great introduction to bees and beekeeping that celebrates the wonder of bees in nature, in our gardens and in the hive.

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The Queen Bee is the matriarch of the hive. She lays up to 1,500 eggs per day, up to 1 million during her lifetime. At its peak, the honeybee colony can have up to 60,000 workers (females) and several hundred drones (males). The workers act as nurses, cleaners and food collectors for the colony: they fly from the hive and visit flowers to collect pollen, to feed to the larvae, and nectar to store as honey, so that they colony has food all year round.

 

The competition ran in spring 2017 and ‘Medb’ proved to be the winning name, with a panel comprising Trinity staff, students, beekeepers and Professor in Botany, Jane Stout, feeling that Trinity’s first queen bee should be named after Queen Medb, a strong female leader in old Irish mythology. ‘Medb’ was suggested by a handful of people, and Dublin resident Cormac McMullan was randomly selected as the winning entrant from those. Congratulations Cormac!

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L to R, Beekeeper and SU President, Kevin Keane, busy bees Emilie and Molly, Professor in Botany at Trinity, Jane Stout, and Eoin Dillon, who is working with some of Trinity’s researchers on a variety of urban bee projects.

See the full story on Trinity News and Events.