Our journey from discovery to legislation/
When Prof McCormack first started working on honey bee research in Ireland little was
known about the genetic composition of the Irish honey bee population. It was assumed
that no honey bees were able to survive in the wild and while members of the Native Irish
Honey Bee Society (NIHBS) were confident that they were breeding the native dark bee
others were more sceptical. The main objective of NIHBS is to protect Ireland’s only
native honey bee. In collaboration with other scientists, beekeepers and members of the
public Prof McCormack’s group set out to explore some of these assumptions. More
recently NIHBS also joined up with the Climate Bar Association and a Green party TD and
together we got enough support to present a Bill to Dail Eireann to ban imports.
Grace McCormack is a Professor in Zoology at NUI Galway. Her interests lie in evolutionary biology and particularly in using molecular data to understand how organisms are related to each other and the impacts this may have on conservation and on the evolution of organismal traits. The interaction between animals and their parasites/pathogens over evolutionary time is also of interest as is the use of this information in applied science such as biodiscovery (marine sponges) and apiculture (bees). Grace started beekeeping to better understand the species she is now studying, and the University apiary managed by her has 12-15 colonies.
source
