This blog documents the story of the Bee Limerick Group and their quest to introduce honey bees back into the city centre of Limerick. Bee Limerick along with its partners are also involved in planting native Irish flowers, shrubs and trees to create a resilient urban ecology.

All About Bee-Limerick

Bee-Limerick is a long term sustainability project that aims to enhance Limerick City’s urban ecology by planting flowers, herbs, shrubs and trees to attract bees back into the city.
The planting regime will see flowers bloom around the city for most months of the year providing bees with a continuous ‘honey trail’ as a result. 

As most people are probably aware at this point in time, the world bee populations are on the brink of collapse. As bees are the planet’s great pollinators this will have huge adverse effects on world food supplies and will ultimately lead to food shortages.

The Bee-Limerick group hope to influence the city's planting programme to focus on more than just the aesthetic and maintenance values of plants.Plants should be chosen that function in supporting a viable ‘urban ecology’.  The Bee-Limerick group will involve city people in the project and so intends to encourage community groups, schools and any other interested parties to participate in the planting, care and maintenance of the city’s plants. They hope to increase civic pride generally by making local people the caretakers for the project thus contributing significantly to sustainability via clear and tangible results- the making Limerick City honey being just one example.

“Ultimately we would like to establish a thriving bee population and bee-keeping culture within the city limits.  This urban ecology concept is not new, as one local bee keeping expert stated ‘there are more bee keepers in the city of London than there are in the whole of Ireland.’”

The ‘Bee-Limerick Group’ also aims to raise awareness of the plight of bees by running lecturers on urban ecology, bee cinema, hive making workshops and honey making classes.