The French overnment wants to create a million new hives and 30,000 new beekeeping jobs
It’s a sweet life! T
here are over 70,000 beekeepers in France, with 1.30 million hives producing 18,500
metric tons of honey each year. In 2010, the French beekeeping sector’s estimated worth was €133.5m. However, despite what sound like enormous amounts of production, the French appetite for honey is so strong that to quench the Gallic thirst for amber nectar, the government is still looking to create a million new hives and 30,000 new beekeeping jobs in order to curtail the importation of honey from foreign soils. If you’re a keen gardener -
and even if you aren’t but love honey and want to support your ecology, buying a home which lends itself to beekeeping can be enormously rewarding. As a beekeeper you will be joining an ancient tradition in France, where emblems of our fuzzy friends can be found as early as 1653 in the tomb of King Childeric I, father of Clovis. Napoléon Bonaparte,
nicknamed ‘The Bee’, dismissed the lion and the cockerel in favour of the bee as the emblem of his royal court. For him, the bee symbolised
an orderly society and tireless industrious diligence – all useful attributes for building a great empire as well as a home! If you are a novice beekeeper
or new to France, don’t worry, there are over 200 beekeeping schools in France. So, it seems that beekeeping is not only viable but very rewarding and, with a little preparation you can build your own sweet life in France!
BRITISH EXPAT KEVIN BAUCHEN RUNS COURSES ON HOW BEST TO PLAN YOUR MOVE TO FRANCE WITH BEES IN MIND.
How did you end up in France? My wife and I were working in the south of England in the charity sector and were looking for a diff erent kind of life, with a truer sense of community, closer to nature and more greenery. With fi ve times the landmass and a smaller population we felt France could off er that more than the UK.
Did you decide on beekeeping before coming here? Yes, we were already beekeeping hobbyists and felt we could turn it into something
48 FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS: March/April 2023
France is a haven for beekeepers – Daniela Harris discovers the buzz about town so you’ll have all the essential information bee-fore you buy a property!
more, a lifestyle. We picked this part of France because, as well as the climate and space, it was aff ordable. The house we are currently living in would cost north of £1m where we came from and we would never have been able to aff ord it.
How do you run your business? On the one hand we run a straightforward B&B side, which has mostly French clientele, and on the other we run beekeeping experiences, for which the clientele are more international anglophones. They typically come for a day course to fi nd out if it is for them and if they decide it is, book again for the week-long course. On the day course, people either take to it or not at all, it’s very black and white.
Most beekeeping in France is small scale, why is that? Like all things in France, there is an awful lot of bureaucracy surrounding running a proper beekeeping farm. We worked out that in order to reach a healthy level of profi tability and pay the social charges the French government demand to run an enterprise, you’d need a
minimum of 110 colonies, that is an awful lot of bees.
What are the main challenges today keeping bees? There are numerous things happening that have created a challenging environment for bees. Climate change is undeniably impacting them in a negative way. Modern-day pesticides create a really big problem for bees and the most recent thing to have devastated bee colonies is the invasive Asian hornet that has been destroying our native species.
So what are the rewards? Surplus honey and beeswax left over from managing our hives are lovely biproducts but not the real reason we have hives. We keep our bees to educate others on their positive environmental impact and give back to the ecosystem by ensuring healthy, natural pollination happens in our area. The joy on new learners’ faces when they conduct their fi rst hive inspections, or chatting with taster session visitors who have just held a handful of honeybees. It’s very rewarding for us to see others
© BIANCA-ACKERMANN/UNSPLASH
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