Down to Earth

City bees: Hungry hives

By:

Mairead DUNDAS

Follow Antonia KERRIGAN

|Valerie DEKIMPe

|Romain CALVETTI

8 min

Paris is abuzz with the hungry hives of hard workers: safe from pesticides, bees feast on the floral diversity of the French capital and beekeepers hail the superior honey. But at what cost? With 20 hives per square kilometre, Paris is at capacity.

Moving three new hives onto the roof of a Paris youth hostel, urban beekeeper Gaël Cartron is sure that these colonies will find everything they need along the tree-lined boulevards, but some neighbourhoods are now saturated and the bees are producing less and less honey.

What we often don't think of, though, is the locals: domestic honey bees are only one of nearly a thousand French bee species. Scientist Isabelle Dajoz warns that food is finite and that the competition brought by domestic colonies leaves wild species struggling to survive.

The answer is simple: more food, fewer hives. We need to plant nutritious bee-friendly crops known as melliferous plants.

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