Kyle Petrie has held a passion for beekeeping since he was a child, and with OpenHive he now leads his own beekeeping company and community, alongside Mark Earley and Ulster Rugby and Ireland prop Jack McGrath.
In addition to making three types of raw honey, OpenHive is also committed to preserving native Irish honeybees, of which there are 99 species and a third are endangered, with two species having been made extinct.
"But the issue is the import of foreign species honey went up 300% last year, and what we have in Ireland is one of the purest strains of the European honeybee, and because we're in Ireland, it hasn't been affected by other bees moving in, but we're starting to lose that."
Petrie works full-time as an agricultural advisor for an international charity, and he worked on beekeeping projects all over the world, crystallising for him what an "amazing" genetic resource Ireland has.
He views OpenHive as a vehicle with greater potential for building awareness of native Irish honeybees than if he and Ealey had just started beekeeping recreationally.
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"We thought we could either do it on our own as beekeepers or start a company and build momentum and have created an example of beekeepers using native Irish bees while making a sustainable business, because the argument for importing bees is they produce more honey.
"We want to show people it is possible to build a good business using our native bees."
Earley grew up on the same road in Glenageary as Petrie's wife, and the pair started working together just before Covid hit, while McGrath joined the company when he was put in touch during the first lockdown, with Petrie and Earley putting an apiary at his home in Greystones.
This year OpenHive started its community project to install 100 conservation boxes at 100 volunteers' homes, preventing bees from going into their chimneys or roofs where they would need to be exterminated or expensively extracted. The captured bees can then be put to work making raw honey.
OpenHive has around 70 colonies of bees and 11 apiaries across south Dublin and Wicklow, with Petrie, schoolteacher Earley and McGrath managing them as part-time beekeepers alongside a team of volunteers.
The company makes a soft honey from oilseed rape, a summer blossom honey, and a heather honey, for which the team brings its hives up to the Wicklow mountains for three weeks in July and August to collect a heather crop from the bees.
OpenHive just came through the SuperValu Food Academy and its products, which retail for around €10, are now available in 15 retail outlets, including two south Dublin SuperValus, as well as online and from its apiaries, which has allowed the company to build a firm customer base.
McGrath's status as a rugby international has also helped OpenHive to secure corporate partnerships with the likes of Powers Whiskey, who have sponsored a number of apiaries, one of them being on the roof of the Devlin Hotel in Ranelagh, which uses the honey in its cocktail bar.
Ahead of Taste of Dublin, where OpenHive will be exhibited on the Artisan Producers' Row, Petrie says he's hoping to meet the company's customers and raise awareness of conservation efforts, including a bill introduced in the Seanad last week to ban the import of foreign bees species.
"We're working on lots of different levels, but to get in front of people and let them taste the honey ... because it tastes nothing like what you can get in some supermarkets, and then build advocacy around the issues that are facing bees in Ireland."
He added: "It's a very seasonal business -- we only have six months of the year where the bees are actually active. It is a tricky one to try and build something that can support three people, so our goal is to really just keep growing and get it to a place where we can go full-time."
OpenHive will be at Taste 2022 June 16 - 19, located at the Artisan Producers Row in front of the band stage. Tickets for the Iveagh Garden event can be found HERE.
Photo: (l-r) Kyle Petrie, Jack McGrath and Mark Earley.
