SUMMER TREATS: Hey Buzz, Where are You?
The remarkable honeybees and the wonders of beekeeping
With contributions from Alice Huang.
I come from a family of beekeepers. The formal term is apiculturists, except that apiculturists are professional beekeepers who keep bees for commercial purpose and we don’t. Some people would call us apiarists, whatever the term, the Bonnefoys keep bees for its honey and as a family tradition.
When I was young, I would follow my grandfather and my father to take care of the hives every now and then. The highlight of the year for beekeeping is in the summer: it is the season for harvest, an activity much anticipated by my younger sister and me when we were children, because we got to uncap the honeycombs full of honey. And there is nothing sweeter than the taste of the warm honey dripping from the uncapped frames.
As with all family traditions, beekeeping comes with its own stories of dramas and legends. I’ve heard many times how my father almost lost a finger in the cogs of a honey extractor, or how it all started when my grand-uncle imposed the gift of a hive upon my reluctant grandfather, a hive that would turn out to be a welcomed source of sugar for the family during the Second World War.
It has been three generations since my family has been keeping bees. To be honest, I am more a dilettante at it, whereas my sister is nearly an expert. She knows how to breed queen bees now, which impresses me to no end.
Unfortunately, these days, the tradition of beekeeping is jeopardised — honeybees are dying all over the world and keeping them needs more time, more energy and more money. Honeybee colonies are disappearing and apiculturists are puzzled by deserted hives that are full of honey. Our apiary located in my grandmother’s village suffers from the intensive usage of pesticides and also new predators and pests like the Asian hornet.
It is without doubt a sad fact that honeybees are threatened and are in decline.
For us, amateurs, it is just about trying to keep a tradition alive, but for the thousands of apiculturists who keep bees for a living, this is becoming a question of survival.
In my grandfather’s days, our apiary reached up to 50 hives — we now only have five. We are hoping that my sister’s new skill could help boost our production. It is more relevant since the demand from family and friends is increasing. Maybe one day, we will break the legendary record of 1,000 kg of honey — but that dream seems far away, since our 2018 harvest only reached 69 kg.
In a twist of fate, worldwide demand for honey has risen to tremendous heights in the past decade. Strangely, honey exports are booming, while harvests are becoming more and more meagre. Some unscrupulous producers in China and other countries with looser standards are mixing honey with water and sugar. To make things worse, this kind of products gets into the hands of even more unscrupulous importers, who then mix this “sugar syrup” with real honey from Europe, and these frankenstein products find their way to the shelves.
Apiculturists, beekeepers and honey lovers have long been aware of the issue and have been trying to raise awareness through campaigning and petitioning. For example, Pollinis, a non-profit organisation gathers concerned European citizens to fight for the protection and conservation of bees and other pollinators, and campaigns for practices that takes farming away from the systematic use of pesticides. But governments in Europe and in China have been slow to react. Some European MPs are only now advocating for stricter regulations on fraudulent honey and on pesticides known to indiscriminately harm flying pollinators vital for global food production.
Meanwhile, it seems that the general interest for beekeeping is getting bigger. Just as people now want to grow their own vegetables, they also want to harvest their own honey, especially as honey is increasingly seen as a healthier alternative to sugar and artificial sweeteners.
Hives have flourished in many cities in the world, much like gardens on rooftops. And city bees are doing much better than country bees — they find an unequalled diversity of flowers and a habitat where health regulations prevent the overuse of pesticides. They prosper in a new garden of Eden spread over Paris, Hong Kong and New York. In London, the St Ermin Hotel even fancies to keep a few hives and a “hotel for bees”. It is ironic that nowadays nature finds a better environment to thrive in cities than in the countryside.
A few weeks ago, I visited our apiary with my father. We wanted to create two new colonies by dividing two hives each in two. The process requires us to force the queen bee to climb up to the upper part of a hive and we have to do that by smoking the lower part, and regularly beating the lower sides of the hive with two wooden sticks, like one would a drum. Then we inserted a board between the upper and lower parts of the hive. Once properly divided, the bees located in the upper part, where the queen bee is, stepped out at the entrance of the hive, flapped their wings in the air and lifted their little butts.
“Are they calling the other bees to come back?” asked my father.
Yes, they were. The queen bee was now safe. And we could hope that the lower part of the hive, cut off from their queen, would breed a new queen. At this point, I could not help but think that honeybees are really remarkable — at least to me — and a world without them would be devoid of buzz and quite, quite dull.
Find out more about honeybees here:
If you are interested in turning a hand to beekeeping, here are a few references for beginners:
British Beekeepers Association
This article was published in the FOOD+ Journal, stories about food, restaurants, chefs, and all that stirs the palate, the mind and the imagination.
More to read:
