Food Academy

Kinsale Honey House

Kinsale Honey House, is a family enterprise owned by husband and wife Killian Murphy & Séad Ní Mhaoilmhia. We are a beekeeping business where we produce delicious natural raw honey foraged by our own bees from the native coastal hedgerows around our beautiful town of Kinsale. The honey is unfiltered, and unpasteurised which is what makes it a raw product, containing all its nutritional enzymes and properties, making it one of nature’s superfoods!

What began as a family project to get a few bees, has turned into a passion to create a better lifestyle and legacy for our children. We have always been passionate about the outdoors and the Irish countryside, curious about our flora and fauna. Beekeeping really opened our eyes to the importance of the preservation of our natural wild heritage, specifically of native trees and hedgerow habitats and all of their biodiversity.  

Both with a background in retail business ownership, the vison required upskilling and education. Killian has pursued his craft of beekeeping passionately, cultivating his pastime to become a professional and commercial beekeeper. Séad has pursued courses and qualifications in sustainable horticulture in order to be able to better understand our countryside and land, and what it takes to build a successful and sustainable local food business. Both pursuits ultimately, to make a more sustainable and meaningful living. Enabling us to bring the consumer a premium 100% Irish raw natural honey product which has been produced locally in a regenerative manner.

Supervalu have immensely helped us as a business by giving us the invaluable opportunity to participate in the SuperValu food program. The program far exceeded our expectations in respect to the level of education, guidance and help which was made available to us. Through this programme, we were introduced to both successful Supervalu small producers, but also other newbies like ourselves, who have been role models for the standard of excellence, transparency of product quality and production. We have even created a network of support for helping and troubleshooting with each other. Finally, seeing Supervalu stock and promote small artisanal produce has been very inspiring as it has made us feel expanding our product output and selling it beyond our locality, is a real possibility.

This whole journey has given us the confidence give back to our local community here in Kinsale through education and practical workshops. Such as the benefits of beekeeping, the importance of pollinators and pollinator friendly planting, wildflower meadow and hedgerow planting. Sead, a very recent past pupil of Kinsale College of further education, facilitates workshops and work experience for the students in practical planting skill demonstration on local farmlands.

Killian is involved with educating and training beekeepers and is a member of a new beekeeping association here in Cork which runs both online course and practical beekeeping workshops.

There are further exciting plans with a local primary school in developing native tree nursey on the grounds of the school!