Former British and Irish Lions prop Jack McGrath has moved into beekeeping after retiring from rugby in 2023.
Career highlights and retirement
During his playing career, McGrath won 56 caps for Ireland, lifting three Six Nations titles including one Grand Slam. He toured with the British and Irish Lions in 2017, coming off the bench in all three Test matches against New Zealand.
At domestic level, he won two Champions Cups, a Challenge Cup and three league titles with Leinster. Injury struggles ended his career in 2023 after a year without a club, and he sought a "comfortable, pain-free life" as an "active dad".
From rugby to beekeeping
After rugby, McGrath's work portfolio included a crane hire company and a fitness business. However, he also took the less conventional step of training in beekeeping with OpenHive Honey during the first Covid lockdown.
With his mother and grandfather having both kept bees, McGrath met OpenHive operator Kyle Petrie in a cemetery in Ireland. He told the Irish Examiner: "I had been given a book on beekeeping, and was looking for something to take my mind off the surgery and recovery and also the whole pandemic. The bees require your whole focus, so it helped put everything else out of your mind."
He previously said: "Humans the world over were all in lockdown, but nature, the bees, they just carried on as if nothing was happening. As a team player, I'm fascinated by how tens of thousands of bees can in one hive can work together as one productive unit."
Conserving the native Irish honeybee
During his training, McGrath learned that the native Irish honeybee is a species under threat. He got his own hives and has remained committed to conserving the species. He is now a partner with OpenHive.
According to the OpenHive website, "the simple focus of OpenHive is to harness a combined passion for beekeeping with a need for environmental sustainability. Launched in November 2019 OpenHive rears and breeds Irish black honeybees. To support this process OpenHive sells locally-produced Irish honey from apiaries in Dublin Wicklow and Galway."
OpenHive keeps bees naturally, with as few interventions as possible, and is committed to maintaining local biodiversity and decreasing impact on the environment, specifically aiming to help the native Irish honeybee re-establish herself in the Irish ecosystem. Even the jars that hold the honey are screen-printed to eliminate the need for single-use plastic labelling and can be returned for future reuse.
