These are bee boles, purpose-built alcoves designed to house traditional beehives before the modern wooden hive came into common use, and they are among the more quietly peculiar things a ruined castle in the Irish midlands might be found to contain. What makes Ballingarry's examples particularly striking is the combination of materials and craft involved: squared limestone blocks framing each opening, with round brick-arched heads, cut stone eaves, and horizontal stringcourses separating the rows. Somebody around 1820 went to considerable trouble to give the bees a proper address.

The setting has its own layered logic. Ballingarry Castle is a substantial medieval structure, its curtain wall built from roughly coursed limestone rubble with a slight base-batter, the outward slope at the foot of a wall that helps deflect attack and shed water. By the nineteenth century, whoever occupied nearby Ballingarry House, which stands roughly eighty metres to the north-northwest, had put the castle's interior to more domestic use, establishing a walled orchard within the bawn, the enclosed courtyard formed by the castle's surrounding walls. The bee boles, dated to around 1820 by the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage, appear to be part of the same phase of repurposing, built against the interior of the north-east section of the bawn wall at roughly the same time a late nineteenth-century house was added to the west wall and a round-arched gateway was cut through the north wall. A medieval defensive enclosure had become, in effect, a sheltered garden, with fruit trees inside and orderly rows of hives along the wall, facing south-east to catch the morning sun, as good beekeeping practice has always recommended.