Museum of Country Life’s new exhibition deserves all the buzz

YOU may have heard the buzz about a new temporary exhibition that opened last week in the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life at Turlough Park. Entitled ‘The Murmur of Bees’ and launched by biologist, author and well-known presenter Éanna Ní Lamhna, it explores the ways fascinating in which bees of all kinds have contributed to Ireland’s environment and Irish culture for centuries.
Before visitors descend the stairs into the main body of the show, they encounter one extraordinary exhibit that lies spotlit behind dark, protective curtains: a drawing of Saint Gobnait, Ireland’s patron saint of bees, by renowned Irish artist Harry Clarke. On loan from the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, this artwork was the template for Clarke’s fabulous stained-glass window in Cork City’s Honan Chapel.
The drawing’s incredible detail is striking, from the finely wrought bees surrounding the saint to the detail on the honeycomb patchwork of her gown. Clarke fans will enjoy noticing the differences between this drawing and the final window – some of the bees didn’t make the final cut, and there are other changes too.
Downstairs is a treasure trove of Irish bee-related artefacts and information, all beautifully displayed in a honeycomb labyrinth of sections separated by honey-coloured curtains. (Young ones will have fun spotting the little golden bees dotted around, clinging to these curtains’ folds.)
Those thirsty for more about Gobnait will be charmed by stories of the saint collected by schoolchildren for the Irish Folklore Comission from 1937 to 1939. The essays also reveal the children’s delight in tales of beekeeping teachers and flighty queen bees causing their colonies to swarm away from their hive.
The natural-history material on show is captivating too. Visitors will find examples of every bee species in Ireland, as well as species from around the world. The enormous diversity among our 110-plus species of bees in Ireland is astonishing, from our much-loved native Dark Honeybee to the distinctive Great Yellow Bumblebee, our most endangered bee. One of its last strongholds is here in Mayo.
There are other, perhaps less charming but no less fascinating bees too, like Marsham’s Nomad Bees, who lay their eggs in the nests of mining bees and steal their food, and Gypsy Cuckoo Bees, who invade the nests of White-Tailed Bumblebees and force them to rear their offspring. The exhibition contains plenty of information on these and more.
There are several bee nests on show too, including the nests of the Moss Carder Bee, the Buff-Tailed Bumblebee and the Paper Wasp. The extraordinary architecture of a Bell Wasp nest is truly something to behold.
Other treasures include wax harvested from a honeybee hive 120 years ago; examples of bee skeps, the traditional straw beehives that pre-date wooden hives; the first book on beekeeping in Ireland, written in 1733; and the early-20th-century Carrickmacross Lace Collar, an exquisitely delicate bee-decorated lace created at St Louis Convent, Carickmacross.
A video installation shows RTÉ footage of beekeepers at work in the 1960s, while a commissioned diorama of a hive’s interior conveys bees’ highly organised and structured world.
Scattered throughout the exhibition are lots of ‘Did you know?’ wall plaques offering random bee-related nuggets. Did you know, for example, that daisy roots boiled with laurel leaves and mixed with butter and beeswax was a cure for burns?
Visitors can also watch honeybees in action, flying in and out of active hives on the museum’s rooftop, from a glass apex viewing area that looks out to a heather garden.
Launching ‘The Murmur of Bees’, Éanna Ní Lamhna brought home the incredible importance of bees to Ireland’s environment, as well as its traditions and culture.
Pointing out that ‘milis’, the Irish word for ‘sweet’, comes from ‘mil’, the Irish word for honey, she spoke about the arrival of honeybees to Ireland thousands of years ago and traced the subsequent significance of bees and beekeeping in Irish culture – enshrined in our Brehon Laws, woven through our folklore and rural traditions, and immortalised in our poetry and literature.
Ní Lamhna also spoke about how pollinators and flowering plants coevolved, each depending on the other for survival, and about bees and other insects’ crucial role in our biodiversity and food security.
“To have an exhibition like this… where we can look back over 2,000 years, where we can see the value of bees in Ireland during all this time… and then you think of what we’re doing to the world – it’s a salutary exercise,” she said, adding: “[Bees] are a vital part of the world in which we live, and if we don’t realise it until it’s too late, then that is definitely our loss.”
A visit to this exhibition will leave you in awe of these fascinating creatures – their behaviours, their diversity and the enormous contribution they make to our world, from the environment to our tables, our culture to our candles. As Ní Lamhna said: “This is a celebration of bees… a celebration of all the goodness and the wonderfulness they have brought us.”

• ‘The Murmur of Bees’ is curated by Dr Aidan O’Hanlon, Curator of Entomology, NMI - Natural History, and Tiernan Gaffney, Curator in the Irish Folklife Collection, NMI - Country Life. It will run until summer 2025, and admission is free.