Cuskinny Garden Walk and Apiary visit 2004,
Organised by Eddie O'Sullivan

Planned and advertised in advance, the Colony Evaluation and Garden Walk at Cuskinny House, was well attended...

The directions on how to find Cuskinny House are included in order to set the scene:-
Take the road to Fota Estate and Wild life Park. Pass the entrance and drive over the bridge. Take a left turn and stay on the main road from there until you come to a cross of four roads. There is a brown signpost, among others, for Cobh Aquatics indicating a left turn. Follow that road for a few miles until you come to a T-junction. The gates to Cuskinny House are facing you across the junction. As parking space in the estate is limited, please take a left turn at the junction and a few yards further on the right on the seashore there is a public parking area.

Sunday May 9th. was a long awaited day for the garden walk and apiary visit to Cuskinny, Cobh, county Cork.

The Kerry and Offaly contingents were the first arrivals and having talked and waited at the gates for a while we drove on up to the house.

Eddie O'Sullivan directed the others from Tipperary, Waterford and Cork as they arrived to the parking area.

Our host, Mrs Wanda Ronan, conducted the tour of the gardens.

The weather was ideal, warm and sunny, and the garden was magnificent for its colour and variety of shrubs and trees. Claire landed me with the job of official reporter and then walked off, the camera does not lie.

[Claire is the GBBG newsletter editor and can be seen striding away in the picture at right, Ed.]

We saw Arbutus with pale pink white flowers, Embothriums flame tree red, Camellias... a lovely pink and red.  As we rose to higher levels of the garden we saw a variety of Escallonias, Rhododendrons, Azaleas, Pieris and blue Echiums that flower for extended periods.

Some unusual plants such as the Azara Microphylla with delicate flowers underneath the leaves filled the air with a vanilla type aroma and also an Azara variegated.  A small Ginkgo, although several years old was dwarfed by some massive Monterey Pines, Pinus Radiata that were surely more than 30 metres high.

Swamp cypresses contrasted with the other trees as did several nice Acers, one lovely Brilliantissimus.  We saw a Myrtle Glanleam Gold with white flowers and a great Paulownia was in full bloom before the leaves appear and these can be 300  mm or greater across.

Some plants that were not in bloom, but are beneficial to bees, were giant lime trees flowering in July, some Eucryphia that flower in September and the driveway was lined with Cordylines and Trachycarpus that flower in June.

A tree that generated a lot of interest was a Mexican Pine, Pinus Patula, touching a branch sent a cloud of pollen into the air.  This is just a sample of the very fine plants that we saw on the day.  We then went into the walled garden and orchard that is very well maintained by Sean.  The bees were very busy on the apple trees.

Finally we came to the bees...  There are three hives that were neglected for some years and were taken in hand by Eddie O'Sullivan last year.

The first two hives were fine with everything as it should be.  As we came to the third hive Eddie warned that they could be a bit "sharpish" but they were very docile, this prompted a comment that really bees were cowards when faced with a number of beekeepers in full battle attire.

This hive had two brood chambers, a very poor one with a mixture of very poor frames and a new good chamber with good frames of drawn comb.  The lugs on some of the frames were rotten and one was broken needlessly as it was handed to Eddie, but he remained cool.  Eddie was very well colour coordinated on the day, with a yellow hive tool, yellow gloves and yellow uncapping fork.

The task was to get it down to a single brood chamber.  There was brood in both, most of it being in the poor frames in the bad box and the queen was in the upper good box.  Suggestions and ideas began to flow as freely as the tide below us.  One person offered a solution and within two minutes was offering a contra solution, a beekeeper with a restrained opinion must be a very rare species indeed.

The solution settled on was as follows:- the poor box on the bottom with all of the poor frames, brood and stores.  Next was put a queen excluder with the good brood box and the good frames and the queen and another queen excluder on top of this box to prevent the queen from entering the super on top.  Thus the queen was confined to the good brood box in the middle, she could neither go up or go down.  The idea then was that the brood would hatch out in the bottom chamber and that the bees would use up the stores below and this box could be removed in three to four weeks on a follow up visit.  The three hives were checked for varroa and all were negative.  Eddie had his queens clipped and all decked out in the Cork colours.