Apparently the purest honey in France comes from Paris. Who knew?

Well, the bees do, I guess, but they were sleeping when I visited Paris last week, so instead I followed a rather wonderful honey dance through the internet – rather like the bees do to tell their fellow bees where the best pollen is to be found – to find out more.

It started with a walk round the Jardin du Luxembourg and stumbling on the apiary there.

And then finding this notice for the Beekeeping School, and the annual Paris Honey Festival, which we only missed by four months. Definitely worth coming back for the Honey Competition next September though.

I’m not sure if my French would be quite up to learning beekeeping but I love the idea of joining a school that was created in 1856, and so claims to be the oldest urban apiary in France. On the website there’s a photograh of the ‘monumental’ apiary that first stood in the Jardin, on land given to a beekeeper, Henri Hamet by General Marquis d’Hautpoul, Grand Referendary of the Senate.

I guess those top hats are the equivalent of the current hoods. Childish of me, but I love the idea of one of these men saluting a beautiful French woman by tipping his hat and a bee flying out!

If you’re interested – and oh let someone reading this be – then you can find out more at Societe Centrale d’Apiculture. One thing I love and haven’t been able to find out more about is how the beekeepers are translated on the website as ‘listeners’. I have heard how important the tradition of ‘telling the bees’ about important events so I wonder if it comes from that. Please tell me if you know!

There are some glorious photographs from the course here.

And then, when I came home, I followed the bees across Paris. I learnt that the reason that Parisian honey is so good is because pesticides have been banned in the city since 2019, and then there’s the rich diversity of plants and trees across the city. I’d love to taste the honey from Jardin Luxembourg to see if I can detect the chestnut trees, for example. And then there are the linden trees in the Tuileries.

But as always with gardens, it’s the characters that make the stories come alive. Take Jean Paucton, for example, a former opera props man who started keeping beehives on the rooftop of the Opéra Garnier, a tradition which is still going strong with now 450,000 bees and with honey sold in the shop alongside more traditional opera-style gifts. Or then there’s Audric de Campeau, of le Miel de Paris, who even uses the damp atmosphere of the Catacombs to age his honey wine.

You can find out more Parisian apiaries here.

You can find out more apiaries here.

There will be more to find out, I’m sure, but for now I’m still dreaming of studying beekeeping in Paris and becoming a listener. As a family, we even have a tradition of being ‘at school’ in the Jardin Luxembourg as my little granddaughter Maisie was at the nursery there last year.

Or I could just take up petanque…

Here are Six Bee Poems by Jo Shapcott. Just gorgeous…

Believe me,
through my mouth dusted yellow
with their pollen, I spoke bees, I breathed bees.