COLUMN
Woody’s worries
To bee or not to bee – is not the fi rst question buzzing around Ruth Wood’s brain
W
hen friends and family come to Brittany with us, I never let them
inside our holiday home until I’ve done what I call an ADIDAS – a quick sweep for animals that are dead, injured, dying or very much alive. Usually, there’s nothing
alarming. A few desiccated housefl ies. The odd upturned woodlouse. Spiders get a free pass as long as they stick to corners and their legs are no more than a millimetre in diameter. But I do like to be sure there’s nothing more challenging, as I’m of the mindset that no holiday starts well with a dead mouse on a mattress or a barn owl fl ying round the bathroom.
BUZZED OFF The one thing that gets to me about the ADIDAS is dead bees. We once returned to our house to fi nd 172 dead honey bees in the bathtub. They were obviously scouts from a spring swarm that had gone looking for a new home and got stuck in our cottage. It was sad hoovering up their little corpses, but at least we managed to locate the hole and block it up. And that, we thought, was
that. Only, when we arrived in early summer this year, there were at least a dozen stiff bumble bees in one of the bedrooms. I vacuumed them up, but over the next few days, more kept popping up – alive but clearly exhausted. What kind of bees were they?
Where were they coming from? How had they got in? Did they have a deathwish or what? My brain buzzed with questions. We took to scooping them up
on sheets of cardboard and taking them into the garden where my niece Sophie tried diligently to revive them with sugar water, but I’m not sure any of them survived.
APICULTURE VULTURE There are close to 1,000 types of bee in France and 400 in Brittany alone, almost all of them solitary species. I’ve never seen the endangered Breton black bee, a hardy character that apparently makes exceptional honey. But I’ve seen violet carpenter bees, big black beauties with
purple wings. I’ve seen some red-bottomed variety buzzing around the lime pointing and a fuzzy orange variety popping up from holes in the garden – mining bees I think. My husband Jon has become
hooked on honey bees and is eager to retire to France as soon as possible so that he can continue the tradition that has kept sweet-toothed humans going for millennia. Barely a day goes by when he isn’t brushing up on his apiculture. “You know it probably took
36 bees their entire lifetime to produce that,” he’ll inform me as I dollop a tablespoon of honey over my porridge. “Actually, it’s probably not pure honey anyway. Pretty much all honey sold in the UK is adulterated with other syrups.” When the French were
protesting over the president’s plans to raise the retirement age to 64, Jon pointed out that honey bees wouldn’t stand for it. “If they think the queen’s lost the plot, they make a new one and turf her out or kill her,” he commented. “It’s just like the French Revolution.”
“I’ve never seen the Breton black bee but I’ve seen a red-bottomed variety buzzing around”
The other day, while I was
digesting dinner, he told me about the wonders of propolis, the super-sticky glue bees make out of saliva, beeswax and tree sap. “If a mouse breaks into their hive and tries stealing their honey, they’ll sting it to death and embalm it in propolis so that it’s mummifi ed and doesn’t decompose,” Jon informed me. Blimey, I thought. That’s one
way of doing an ADIDAS. “Propolis is antiseptic,
anti-infl ammatory, antioxidant, antibacterial, antimycotic, antifungal, antiulcer, anticancer and immunomodulatory,” he added. “What does
immunomodulatory mean?” I asked. “Anyway, I’ll just be in the garage,” he replied. If we ever do retire to France,
one of Jon’s fi rst jobs will be to build a hive and try to catch a wild honey bee swarm. He already knows what type of hive he’ll build – not the ‘Kenyan Top Bar’ favoured in Africa, not the ‘National’ preferred in the UK, but a ‘Warré’ hive, invented in the 1950s by the French monk Émile Warré. If I’m still writing for French
Property News, I’ll tell you all about it in my new column, Woody’s Warrés. ■
There are almost 1,000 types of bee in France, and 400 in Brittany alone 106 FRENCH PROPERTY NEWS: September/October 2023
© PEXELS/
MICHEILE.COM; FLIKR/GUILHEM VELLUT; PEXELS; UNSPLASH/ MICHELLE ATKINSON
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148
