These recesses are known as bee-boles, and their presence in a wall is one of the more telling signs that a household once took its honey and beeswax seriously enough to give its hives a degree of architectural shelter. The example at Bouluskeagh is one such survival, a small but deliberate piece of rural infrastructure from an era when bees were as much a part of a working farmstead as any livestock.

Bee-boles were built into walls, usually south or south-east facing, to protect wicker or straw skeps from rain and wind. Before the introduction of the modern wooden hive in the nineteenth century, skeps were the standard vessel for keeping bees across Ireland and Britain, but they offered no weatherproofing of their own. A niche in a sheltered wall solved that problem neatly, and the practice of incorporating bee-boles into garden or kitchen-garden walls was widespread from at least the medieval period through to the early modern era. Their survival into the present is often a matter of chance; once the skeps were gone and beekeeping practices changed, the recesses had no obvious new function and were sometimes filled in or demolished. Those that remain tend to do so simply because the wall around them was sturdy enough to outlast any particular reason to alter it.