Paris: City of Bees

In this town, bees are practically as omnipresent as baguettes.

I was lucky enough to be invited to the very first honey harvest on the roof of La Poste du Louvre,
Paris' central post office, located next to the Musee du Louvre.
Not only is it France's only 24/7 post office, but it is also the first such establishment in France
to install hives on its roof... others around the country will follow suit next spring! 

The ceiling-high glass beehive inside the apartment of a beekeeping couple
Imagine eating dinner across the table from this display! 

A photo showing the apartment balcony in wintertime, beehives buried under the snow.

A set of bee pencil-sharpeners is on display in the beekeepers' apartment.
Each one represents a different role played by the bees in the hive:
guards, queen, workers, drones, larva, nurses, etc. 

Elaine posing with a jar of pollen inside "Famille Mary," one of the city's many honey boutiques

A honey, beeswax, and bee products boutique in the 13th arrondissement.

Here, I'm talking with the pastor of a church near the Champs Elysees; he keeps beehives on the roof of the church.
(The honey is sold as a fundraiser for the church.)

I spied the word "ruche" on the side of a building on the Rue de Rivoli.
"Ruche" means "beehive," here used to describe the Samaritaine's
employment of thousands of  people after World War II; it was a "hive of activity"

Today's bonus pictures: capoeiristas having a roda on the lawn of the Louvre.
(That kid's macaco is impressive, no?)

Headlines abuzz with bees...and politics

Having just reached the halfway point in my stay in Paris, I’ve begun to change gears in this research project. I say “Au revoir” to weeks filled with serial interviews and honey harvests; my creative juices are now dedicated to writing. No, not writing this blog, as you may have noticed, but chipping away at the twenty-five page paper which I am obliged to present to my school. A small price to pay indeed! I do not think I’ll be suffering any sort of writer’s block with this essay, except perhaps the occasional bee sting to my hands.

Other than writing furiously, I’ve been reading up on the biggest headline-making news item in the States. Though it has nothing to do with the raising of debt ceilings, it has just as many people worked into a tizzy. Below are a collection of articles which give a nice overview of just how big of a deal this whole newfangled urban beekeeping trend is.

June 2011: Read about Nicole, a homeowner near San Francisco, whose neighbor is dangling the local zoning laws over her head and ordering her to remove a new beehive from her garden, or else… http://www.usatoday.com/LIFE/usaedition/2011-06-22-Beekeeping-fights_CV_U.htm

August 2, 2011: In this BBC interview, my maybe-someday mentor, Professor Jane Memmot, discusses the fascinating paradox about how pollinators flourish in urban habitats. Also worth noting is the £10-million “Insect Pollinators Initiative”, funded by several organizations and governments in Britain. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14309007

2010: Watch the trailer for “Queen of the Sun,” an award-winning documentary about the beauty of bees and humanity’s interdependence with them. (I secretly hope to screen this film on campus next semester, perhaps with a honey tasting to follow.)

http://www.queenofthesun.com/

The New York Times website has a special section devoted to bees, through which you can read all about the latest rooftop hive installations in NYC, and the fight to legalize beekeeping throughout the city.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/bees/index.html

Last, but not least, is a link to the website of Los Angeles’ traditional beekeeping club, the “Backwards Beekeepers.” Given that beekeeping is highly regulated in Los Angeles county, with zoning codes that differ from  neighborhood to neighborhood, these Angeleno bee-enthusiasts have the challenging task of uniting L.A. under a less-restrictive beekeeping code. Needless to say, I’ll be joining this bunch of backwards beekeepers when I return home to L.A. Maybe I’ll even buy the tee shirt.

http://www.backwardsbeekeepers.com/

“Aïe! Je me suis piquée!”

Good news: Today I found out that I’m not deathly allergic to honeybee venom.

Bad news: Today I got my very first bee sting.

On Thursday afternoon, I met Thierry, the beekeeper in charge of the pedagogical beehives at le Parc Georges Brassens. The public park is always abuzz with activity—with humans and bees alike—and is conveniently located, a mere fifteen-minute walk from my apartment. On my way to meet the beekeepers, I made my very first visit to one of the three patisseries on my block, and picked up my very first Parisian pain au chocolat, which we call a “chocolate croissant” in English. Bon appétit!

The operation run by the four-person team ran like a smooth machine.
Their teamwork reminded me of the division of labor within the hive itself.
Who says that beekeeping doesn't involve philosophy?

As a person who’s unaccustomed to seeing beehives and vineyards in my neighborhood park, le Parc Georges Brassens was a revelation to me. Twenty beehives and a small building, surrounded by a fence: since its establishment in 1986, the Societe Centrale d’Apiculture estimates that about eighty thousand children have learned about the secret lives of bees through this rucher ecole, the “hive school” run by the SCA. The honey from all of these hives was harvested today, in the third of most likely four harvests this year. These bees are prolific honey producers; elsewhere in the city, the bees only create enough honey for one harvest. Because the SCA hives are located on public property, the Paris city government does not allow the honey to be sold, at any time other than at the annual Fête du Miel, the Honey Festival, which takes place in the park every September. (I’ll just miss it!) The vineyards are harvested each year at the same Fête, though I am told that the Paris wine isn’t very good—it’s just fun to have.

The camera decided to focus on my glove rather than the bee, but you can still see the ball of pollen on her back leg.
This is how bees transport pollen from the flowers to the hive, where they eat it and feed it to the baby bees.

When I left, I was presented with a jar of complimentary honey—the seventh such jar I’ve garnered from this project so far. Sweet success! “Honey” really is just a category: the range of radically different tastes, smells, and consistencies of nature’s condiment is really incredible.  On Wednesday, I met a retired couple who have kept bees on the balcony of their Paris apartment for over two decades. I bought three different types of honey from them, along with a bottle of Hydromel, the world’s most delicious alcoholic beverage: honey mead. The most distinctive honey I bought is made from the pissenlis (dandelion) nectar, and it smells absolutely repulsive; the sweet, mellow taste is therefore quite a welcome surprise to the palette.

le Jardin des Plantes
Luckily, this shot was taken an hour before the surprise afternoon rainstorm.
(Luckily again, my New Zealand training has conditioned me to always carry a raincoat.)

Today, Friday, I met Theirry again for a look at the rucher (apiary) at the Jardin des Plantes (The Paris version of our Arboretum, for all my fellow Angelenos out there). We joined a small team of student naturalists to open up the seven hives, which are overseen and funded by the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle (to translate into English, just switch around the words a bit). As in le Parc Georges Brassens, the honey from these hives may not be sold, and is instead gifted to Museum VIPs.

This is one of two such "Bee Hotels" in the Jardin des Plantes. Complete with various types of habitats for the wild bees which require different habitats, it is designed specifically for les abeilles sauvages. (Fun language note: sauvage in French means "wild," not "savage.")
Bravo for the Jardin: non-domesticated pollinators like wild bees are actually ecologically more important than their domesticated sisters, the honeybees.

After a few hours wandering the b-e-a-utiful grounds of the Jardin des Plantes, during which I felt like a very cool American (not a very common feeling in Paris, but apparently young French people think L.A. is a very fashionable place to be from), I wandered over to another world-class garden, the Jardin du Luxembourg. 

The rucher ecole at the Jardin du Luxembourg

Three hives, each with the trademark hexagonal toit on top ("roof" in French, dunno what it is in English)
Apparently my default language for bee-related thoughts is French.
Am I fluent? Yes, just so long as we're talking about bees...

The grounds of this particulargarden is home to the Senat building, a bandstand or two, an enormous jungle gym that was tempting even for me, lots of walking paths shaded by tall trees, and another of the SCA’s rucher ecoles, this one for adults. This particular “hive school” was started in the mid-1800s, evidence that urban beekeeping’s current popularity is not a new phenomenon in Paris; it is a revival of a centuries-old tradition.

And now I bid you adieu with this lesson, taken from the bees:
Just dive right in!
(No, they're not dead- they're eating the honey out of the frames we've removed from the hive.
They know we're taking it away from them!)

"Bises" and Bees

The view from our balcony: fireworks for Bastille Day, "Le quatorze juillet"

I knew Bastille Day was the great national holiday of France, but I had no idea that I’d end up kissing so many people that evening. Likewise, I knew that the French traditionally greet each other with an exchange of pecks on each cheek, the scene playing out like this: the newcomer enters the door, is greeted by my own hostess, also the hostess of this Bastille Day party. They approach me in the kitchen, where I am busy chopping celery, they lean in, and we exchange a kiss on the cheek—left side first—we say our names, then kiss the other cheek. They smile, and sometimes say “Enchanté” before walking away to perform the ritual on all the other guests in the room. Luckily, I expected this particular habit, and I think I was quite graceful about it, though I’m always amused by watching the chain reaction of kisses each time someone new enters the room.

I’ve come leaps and bounds since my first encounter with the European kiss/greeting: upon having my personal bubble unexpectedly invaded by a kindly old lady, I panicked, dodged her incoming kiss, and somehow managed to entangle myself in her glasses. As I frantically tried to free my spectacles from hers, my earring got stuck in her hair, followed by a rather awkward series of apologies, and giggles on my part. It was a learning experience, shall we say. Now I’m a pro at giving and receiving these friendly little “bises,” which the French view as much less physically intrusive than the traditional Californian greeting, the hug.

This shelf in the SNA office holds beekeeping books and publications,
including the "Beekeeper's Bible" in the middle of the second-to-top shelf

I’ve also made lots of progress with the good ol’ bees since my last post. Four conversations later, I have learned more about beekeeping than I ever thought existed. I met a representative of the Syndicat National d’Apiculture, one of the three beekeepers’ unions in France. The SNA is heading a public awareness campaign titled “L’Abeille: Partenaire de la Biodiversité,” and also publishes a monthly newsletter called “L’Abeille de France.” (Abeille is “bee” in French, in case you didn’t figure that out.)

Mr. President showing me the two hives in le Parc Monceau.
The bees were so friendly,  he picked up some bees without wearing gloves!

The SNA gentleman introduced me to a set of hives located in one of Paris’ numerous public parks, le Parc Monceau. The two hives are located on top of a decorated grotto of sorts. We stepped over the low fence which bore a sign forbidding the public from entering: “Danger!” (In English, too!) Climbing a small set of stairs up this decorative hill in the middle of the park, we found the two hives, which were affixed to a low plinth. After I spied a few shards of broken glass, I asked my guide if vandalism was a problem at the hives. He said that it’s not a big concern, but that small children sometimes stray too close to a hive, and, unaware that bees are very protective of their hive, accidentally get stung.

Yes, this shirt is actually sold in a real, live, upscale Paris boutique, Zadig & Voltaire.
Apparently Nebraska is Paris' favorite state. Go, Cornhuskers!

As acting President of the Syndicat National d’Apiculture, my interviewee, is one of the most influential representatives for many of the beekeepers in France. The beekeeping vote has a lot of clout in this country, mostly due to the agriculturally strong southern France. Somewhat due to France’s leftist leanings, I believe, professional beekeepers receive government subsidies, have a great deal of legal protection, and are skilled in the art of unionizing (according to a wonderful reference I’ve found, the apiculteur Dr. Sanford at Florida University).

The most beautiful chocolate confection I've laid eyes on: a dark-chocolate bee, for only 39 Euros!

For the first part of the interview, we were joined by a video journalist who is in the process of filming a special segment on the city’s many beehives. Later I discovered that he is quite a busy man: he meets with two or three people every single week who want to talk with him, as I am doing. Many of them are associated with the media, but none of them have been from students from the USA—it looks like I’m the first in that category! Tomorrow, I will meet the SNA President again, for a tour of the beehives on top of France’s only 24-hour post office, next to the Musée du Louvre. I hope these bees are as nice as the ones in the Parc Monceau, because I still don’t have a bee suit!

A nine-man band playing in the subway: what a treat for us passers-by.
Thanks to subway acoustics, I could still enjoy them while waiting for my train on the platform a hundred meters away :)

After the interview, he brought me to the “Au Rucher” boutique, an SNA-affiliated storefront which sells anything and everything a beekeeper might need, from protective suits to honey, to honey extractors (a steal for only 780 Euros!). We talked a bit with the gentlemen in the shop, and before I left, they presented me with a jar of honey from the SCA’s hives in a Parisian park, the Bois de Vincennes. Yum! Immediately upon returning home, I wrenched open the jar, and ate a spoonful of the golden honey. I was struck by the unexpected minty taste, and by the low viscosity.

One of these is for me!

This morning, while sipping coffee with my fourth interviewee, I found out what caused the minty taste. Much of Parisian honey is given its character by the lime, acacia, and sophora trees that are so common along the streets of Paris. He and his beekeeper friend are the foremost producers of honey in Paris. Fortunately for me, he speaks very fluent English. I met him at the Sunday morning marché at the Place des Fêtes, a glorious place full of stalls manned by venders from every type of produce and artisan food imaginable. I find the stall I’m looking for, the table heaped with every kind of bee product imaginable. Letting his partner take over the stall, the kindly beekeeper removed his vendor hat and took me out for a morning coffee. An hour and a half later I emerged from the coffee shop, enlightened about all things Apis, from politics to the fine art of capturing swarms. (Apis is the genus of a popular honeybee, Apis mellifera.) In our conversation, I discovered the complex irony of France’s apicultural situation involving the enormous wheat lobby, money, agrochemical corporations, money, politicians, money, the success of urban apiculture, money, and the people without whom agriculture would be nonexistent: beekeepers. The interplay between these issues will probably form the backbone of my research paper. It’s lucky for me that it’s so complex, since I’ll have to write for 25 pages! I’d better get crackin’…

Now that's a lot of honey! (and pollen, and propolis, and soap, and wax, and candles....)

Today's bonus picture, taken last week when I joined in on a capoeira training session with a group based here in Paris.
(Capoeira Sul da Bahia- France, under Mestre Railson, for all you capoeiristas out there. For those same folks, please join me in marvelling at how many pretty berimbaus there are in this shot.)

A Toast to Serendipity

Quelle journee!

“What a day!” en français.

When I walked into the office belonging to my first interviewee this morning, I expected to meet this architect /beekeeper, his colleagues, and some bees. I certainly did not expect to see a camera crew in his office, adjusting the lighting and furniture, as if for an interview. "That’s odd," I thought. Then I realized, “Oh wait, the camera- it’s set up for me! Ack!” My hand immediately goes to my hair, and I quickly assess its frizziness level, amplified by this morning’s rainstorm.

Pour moi? "For me?"
Eeek!

It turns out that Interviewee Number One has a friend who makes documentaries and enjoys practicing camera work on her friends, so he had offered our interview to her as camera fodder. He apologized for not letting me know in advance, and asked if this was alright: though my mind was preoccupied with the thought of my sorta-kinda-halfway-fluent-French-speaking skills being immortalized on film, I eeked out a Bien sûr! "But of course!"

The architect/beekeeper's atelier (workshop)

How fortuitous that somebody else was recording this interview; I was free to focus completely on our conversation. To sit there with a camera rolling while I asked questions of a real, live, French beekeeper made the experience a bit surreal. Every conversation I have en français is another step towards fluency, and it’s nice that it’ll be on film!

See all those white caps on the cells? Those cells are plein de miel, full of honey.
Sweet success!

As bees aren’t the happiest of campers in rainy weather, I’d accepted the fact that I would be interviewing only humans today, but Lady Luck struck again: the rain stopped, the clouds cleared, and the sun showed her lovely face. Out we went, climbing a small stepladder out a back window on the top floor, onto a small patio area, where there were three hives. One hive was stacked three boxes (“honey supers”) high, and the other two were set up, and the colonies inside were in the process of “growing,” as he described it. That one hive was plein, full, of honey! It was magical to see the bees lining up at the entrance to the hive, like planes taxiing on the runway. Then they would fly off into the sunny city, at what looked like a precise 45-degree angle from the ground. Maybe that’s why they call it a “bee line.”

The smoker, which is used to calm the bees upon opening a hive.
And a garden ornament, just bee-cause!

Well, this was my first day “on the job,” research-wise. Absolutely nothing went according to plan, but absolutely everything turned out marvelously. I didn’t even know this man existed before I happened to pick up a discarded Le Monde on the subway last Friday, flipped it open to a random page, and found an article in which he was interviewed about urban beekeeping in Paris. Not only did I discover his existence by chance, but after I found his email address via Google, he happened to agree to an interview, during which he generously offered me a list of his beekeeper friends who would also be happy to meet me. Today’s lesson: let thy expectations remain loose, making room for serendipity to fly in. 

All Around the World

Le Canard Stéréotypé Française, a stereotypical French Duck.
See the Eiffel Tower in the center of the background? 

How lovely it is to be awoken by the sun, especially when the view out my window is of a glorious summer morning in Paris. Most windows are perpendicular to the ground, thus increasing the opportunities for people-watching, and for viewing spectacular skylines and Eiffel Towers. The window in my room is focused on other things: tilting towards the sky, due to the slanted ceiling, my window welcomes the sunbeams which illuminate my little room. Lying on my bed, I can watch the never-ending stream of clouds as they drift over Paris.

As I acclimate to the Parisian speed of life, it’s hard to believe that I left Los Angeles twelve days ago; stranger still is the fact that only two weeks have gone by since I waved goodbye to my New Zealand friends. 

My entry visa into France!
(On the right, you can see my student visa for New Zealand. It's still valid until the end of August...)

The itinerary of my past two weeks shows a veritable whirlwind tour of the world: I left Dunedin on June 23, arrived in LA on the same day (I’m still confused about how that’s possible), departed LA two days later, met my dad and sisters for dinner during a 45 minute layover in Philadelphia, arrived in Paris on the morning of June 26, met the couple whose apartment I’m staying in this summer, dashed off to one of Paris’ main train stations, caught a high-speed train to Taizé, France, where I spent a week at a monastery, and finally returned to Paris on July 3.

Truly an international crowd. I was definitely in the minority as a native English-speaker,
but I was amazed to find that almost everyone spoke English to some degree, most very well.

The week in Taizé was exactly what my internal clock needed to recover from the five time zones I’d lived in on three continents, all in the span of four days. Luckily, I had predicted that I would need such a respite during this transition time, and had blocked out a week just for this purpose. Now I will attempt to explain what Taizé is, though I already know that my description cannot do it justice. Perhaps this is because I can’t articulate exactly how the thrice-daily prayer affected me, or maybe I am still in awe of the thousands of young people who surrounded me, all speaking in unfamiliar languages. Taizé could be the definition of ecumenism. Not once during the entire week, which I spent working in the kitchen, walking in the stereotypically picturesque French countryside, attending talks by the brothers, and talking with new friends at Bible studies and over meals, did anyone mention what “sort” of Christian they were. Baptists, Catholics, Presbyterians, Orthodox, Anglican—those words are effectively meaningless at Taizé, a place which celebrates the global community of Christians and focuses on similarities rather than differences. It’s amazing how much can be learned about the world during a retreat from the world.

Watching the sunrise at Taize, 5:30am 

Though the Train de Grande Vitesse, or “the TGV” as everyone calls it, transported me from Taizé to Paris in under two hours, these places are worlds apart in every respect (except for freshly baked baguettes, which are practically omnipresent, and omni-delicious, throughout the country.) From the balcony of the apartment, I have a clear view of the Boulevard Peripherique, which looks a bit like the Pasadena Freeway crossing over the Arroyo Seco. It is always busy, but there are only three lanes in each direction instead of four or five, or however many there are. The cars are smaller, and more people ride motorcycles and scooters than back home in LA. The public transit system is like a dream, but then again Paris is a very densely populated city, so it’s practical to have free, public bicycle stations every few hundred meters.

The apartment I'm staying in is above a cafe, and has a balcony with a view.
I couldn't have asked for a better situation, and with lovelier hosts!

But enough about the merits of Paris city planning; let’s talk about the real deal, the reason I’m here in the first place. Though I don’t consider myself to be one hundred percent fluent yet, I’ve successfully lined up some appointments with some bee experts. On Wednesday, I had my first phone call, all in French—what a feeling of success! Today I’ve got another one. Phone calls are the hardest task when speaking in a new-ish language, because of the complete lack of gesticulations and facial cues, and the presence of background cell phone noise. But I did it nonetheless, and managed to set up an appointment next week with the secretary of the National Beekeeping Union. I’ve just confirmed two more meetings with beekeepers, dates to be announced. I’m particularly excited about meeting the pastor who keeps beehives on the roof of his church: the honey is sold as a fundraiser.

The evening sun as seen from the rooftop cafe at Printemps, a fantastic department store in central Paris.

I’ve got so much more to say, but I’ll just have to tantalize you with this picture, in which you see my post-shopping afternoon snack. We had champagne, and my hostess Liz introduced me to the delectable, multicolored French version of macaroons, all on the rooftop patio of a department store, with a fantastic 360-degree view of the early evening sunset over Paris. 

My daily afternoon snack.
(Yeah right!)