Invasive Species Policy Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-26 ============================================================ PJ Murphy (FG), Agricultural Panel I appreciate the selection of this Commencement matter. I have been attempting to raise this for a number of months and feel particularly strongly about it. I thank the Minister of State for coming in to take the matter on behalf of the Minister for agriculture. In October 2021, Senator Vincent P. Martin introduced a Bill that unanimously passed this House to ban the import of honeybees into Ireland. To give a background reason for wanting to implement such a ban, northern Europe, from Poland to Ireland, France and Scandinavia, up until 100 or 150 years ago, was the home of the northern European black honeybee, Apis mellifera mellifera in Latin. Over the past 150 years, the range of this species of bee has declined and declined further and further, with the introduction of Mediterranean and Asian strains of honeybee into Europe. There is one last remaining stronghold of the northern European black honeybee in the world, which is Ireland. In recent years, imports of queen bees of different strains have increasingly diluted the pure genes of our native honeybee. To explain how difficult it is to control, when bees mate and breed, they are not like livestock. They are not like horses, cattle or sheep, where the bull is put in the same field as the cow the farmer wants it to mate with, or a stallion with a mare, or a ram with a ewe. We cannot control the way that bees mate. When a virgin queen bee is ready to mate, she flies out of the hive and to a bee congregation area, where she will mate with between eight and 20 drone bees from a number of different colonies in the vicinity, and then return, mated, to her parent colony. The beekeeper has no control over the mating process. Therefore we have no ability to keep the strain of bees pure once non-native bees are present in the vicinity. A number of companies across Europe are marketing non Apis mellifera mellifera queens to be sold into Ireland. Beekeepers here, again and again, choose to buy those bees, and they are endangering the last true remaining stock of northern European honeybees. With every year that passes, the percentage of pure Apis mellifera mellifera in our national gene pool decreases in comparison with the non-native strain. Very soon, the scales will be tipped beyond the point of no return. Whenever the percentage in the gene pool reaches a certain level, we cannot recover, and we are very close to that point. Not only must this ban be introduced for the protection of the pure strains of indigenous bees but we also must think about the threat of disease and parasites coming with the import of bees. Back in the late 1990s or early 2000s the varroa mite was accidentally introduced to this island. My God, how we wish we could turn the clock back and implement the ban before that parasitic mite decimated our bees in the 1990s and early 2000s. The warning was there. The Government at the time was warned we needed a ban on the introduction of bees but there was no action. Now we have the tropilaelaps mite, which is a much more dangerous mite, on the edge of Europe. It will absolutely decimate our bees if we do not implement a ban as soon as possible. I have four questions for the Minister of State. Will the Government support this Bill? If it will I want to know when and if it will not I would like to know why. The required research has been done. Does the Department consider that a robust scientific and legal basis for legislative action based on the findings of this research now exists and does the Government intend to amend the Bill in any way based on the research's findings? Given the imminent threat posed by the tropilaelaps, mite does the Department intend to implement an interim ban on the importation of honeybees as soon as possible as a precautionary measure? Will the full assessment of the research by the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine's independent experts be released together with the results of the research delivered in December 2024? --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-05-26/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:59+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-05-26