Using the power of nature for bees and humans

Lifestyle – Dara Scott’s passion for bee-keeping began when he was living in New Zealand. Since then, the Galway man has moved from deep-sea exploration to developing a seaweed-based supplement to keep honeybees healthy and productive. It’s become a leading product in a niche market. Now his company is branching out into a bodycare range that’s also based on natural products, as he tells JUDY MURPHY.

When physics graduate Dara Scott took a year out from his career in 2002 to travel to New Zealand and work on organic farms in return for bed and board, he discovered honeybees.                            It was the beginning of a fascination that was to ultimately change his career path – although that didn’t happen immediately.

“Everywhere I went I could the see beehives,” he says of his New Zealand experience.  It was different to Ireland where hives are generally not visible and it piqued his interest.

Dara, who was born in Galway City and whose family later moved to Moycullen, studied at GMIT and NUIG, and joined Bayer Ireland after college. Based in Dublin, he was involved in research, development and quality control in the area of medical instruments.

But it wasn’t for him, so he left to go travelling throughout Asia and on to New Zealand where his growing fascination with honeybees left him determined to get into bee-keeping. That’s what he did, gradually, while also continuing to work in his specialist scientific field.

After his ‘gap year’ Dara went on to spend almost a decade working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which is based in Cape Cod in the USA. It’s the world’s leading, independent, non-profit body dedicated to ocean research, exploration and education.

Dara was responsible for managing its underwater robot, Jason which at the time, was the deepest ocean robot in the world capable of travelling to depths of 6,500 metres (four miles).

Based out of Hawaii and Seattle, the job required a lot of travel – mostly to the Pacific region – because the ocean there is deeper, he explains.

The intensive nature of the contract work meant that when he was off, Dara could return to Ireland for lengthy periods.

That was when he followed his passion for honeybees, having begun keeping them after returning from New Zealand in the early 2000s. Dara had attended a meeting of the Galway Beekeepers’ Association. Its chairman, Professor Breandán Ó Cochláin, took the younger man under his wing.

“He kindly took me out and I learned by watching him,” Dara recalls of Professor Ó Cochláin who taught Physical Chemistry at NUIG. And the professor also gave Dara his first hive. That happened when he was called to deal with a swarm in the city and Dara accompanied him.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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