>Here in the UK our bees must have been over wintering largely on ivy honey for the last 10,000 years or so since the ice retreated and we became an island.  I don't feed my bees syrup and have never noticed any problems with ivy honey.

We have two main species of ivy in the UK and there was a discussion of this on the Irish beekeeping list some time ago.  As I recall:

Common ivy (Hedera helix) gives good yields of pollen but not so much nectar.
Irish ivy (Hedera hibernica) gives good yields of both nectar and pollen.

We here have Hedera helix and rarely see much honey stored from ivy,  but we do get large amounts of pollen in most years.
Chris I think is fortunate to have Hedera hibernica - and a climate which seems to enable his bees to use the very fast granulating, hard honey that it produces.

All beekeeping is local (should we have a new initialisation for that? ABIL?)

Best wishes

Peter 
52°14'44.44"N, 1°50'35"W

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