French wildlife and beekeeping

It’s that time of year again when the bees are swarming and I’m busy collecting them or at least trying to in my own apiary. It’s also the time of year when the phone starts ringing, usually because people have a colony of bees that has taken up residence somewhere in their house and this is something I've been meaning to put in print for years. To start I’ll provide a little simple background on what a honey bee swarm is and why they do it as it’s not something everyone understands or knows about unless they keep bees. A honey bee colony is a group of bees made up of tens of thousands of individual insects that are continually dying and being replaced, the bulk of the bees are “workers”, (sterile females), with a smaller and more variable number of drones, (males), depending on the time of year and usually with one Queen, (there are exceptions to the latter but that’s not important here). Being a colony or a functioning whole it has to find a way to reproduce itself, ...

20 years or so ago it would have been impossible to find an Otter or Beaver in any of the rivers and waterways of the Vienne department of France; in fact, the Otter was almost pushed to extinction in France and was only to be found in the Atlantic regions and the Massif Central by the 1980’s. Since then, there has been a steady improvement, with continuous recolonisation inland towards the east along the main river systems and their tributaries. In the Vienne department, we have the  Charente, which enters the sea near Rochefort, and the Vienne, a tributary of the  Loire . Both of these rivers also have numerous tributaries; notably, in the Vienne, these are the Clain and the Gartempe, which again have their tributaries. The situation with Beavers is somewhat different,  following their extinction in most of  France, with  reintroduction being required in many places. The only river in Poitou Charentes where a reintroduction was attempted was the Creuse...

With the spring well and truly advanced and the Oil seed rape, (Colza), flowering in the fields locally I finally managed to get the last of the “honey supers” on yesterday and breathed a sigh of relief - just in time, always at the last minute. Once the temperature exceeds about 15 – 16°C Oil seed rape produces sufficient nectar to create what bee keepers call “a flow” and at this point Honey bees will go totally crazy for it and will travel past all the other sources of nectar such as plum, cherry, apple and blackthorn to reach it, sometimes by several kilometres. The introduction of spring flowering rape has been one of the major changes both in the French countryside and for honey bees in the last 20 / 25 years with production in 1985 of 1.4 million tons, 1995 of 2.8 million tons, 2005 of 4.5 million tons and 5.5 million tons in 2012.  The change is so great in the areas where it is grown that it has completely altered the behaviour of bees in spring and weather condit...

I’ll start with a short, simple explanation of some basics for readers that aren’t clued up on keeping bees. If we begin with the general type of bee hive that has been used by most keepers in France and the UK for the last 100 years or so which comprises a Brood box or what we could call the “hive proper” where the colony lives and the Supers which are placed on top of the Brood box for the excess honey production that the keeper takes. A Queen excluder is placed between the Brood box and the supers. This is a grill made either from metal or plastic that allows the workers to pass through but prevents the larger Queen from "getting upstairs" and laying eggs in the honey supers, however skinny Queens do sometimes get through. Click to enlarge images. If you look at the picture you can see these have wooden frames placed inside them, one size for the Brood box and another size for the Supers. These frames are to support the comb and it has been common practice ...

It’s been known for some time now, 9 or 10 years at any rate that a number of sites in the area have been selected as places for wind turbines with all the relevant wind speed and duration tests completed and found to be satisfactory and one thing we certainly have here is wind for much of the year. Then came the preliminary approvals for the ones proposed near us with the two relevant Mairies, (Romagne and Blanzay), giving their consent. Well folks, there are a few things that always rattle peoples cages and having a wind farm being built close to where you live is one of them and it wasn't long before some of the local residents were “getting organised” and preparing to fight this proposed outrage. As with all such projects there was an opportunity for people to make their views known and register their objections or indeed support. At some point some people formed an association – the A ssociation de   D éfense et de   P rotection de l’ E ...

All of a sudden whoosh, the sun is shining, the air is warm and the spring rush commences and it’s early by a good week or two, surprises everywhere with the last 7 or 8 days having been simply gorgeous with spectacular apricot and plum blossom and spring flowers everywhere. As usual at this time of year I find myself falling behind or more correctly that I have fallen behind with all those jobs that should have been finished by now, so just a quick update on what I've managed to capture with the Trail Camera I purchased back in November last year as mentioned HERE. Other than a constant stream of Roe deer that is to be expected, (I can see them easily in the fields outside most days, even right up close to the house), I managed to get a short clip one night of a badger at a friends property and will go back there soon now the hunting season is over. Sadly Badgers are hunted and persecuted in France on a large scale and although my friends’ woodland is removed from h...

Due to the "peculiar nature" of the situation with the Ortolan Bunting in France I've chosen to blog this rather than use a page on the web site. T he situation in France . In Les Landes the Ortolan bunting is a species that has historically been captured to be eaten as a “Regional delicacy”, a food reserved mainly for the rich that was served in the best restaurants of Paris and the other large French cities and has graced the tables of the wealthy and  politicians for hundreds of years. It was for this reason that France derogated this species from the European Bird Directive. This led to something of a paradox because although the Ortolan bunting wasn't listed as protected in France neither was it included on the list of species permitted to be hunted. This enabled them to be captured alive, transported, kept in captivity, bought and sold and killed – BUT NOT HUNTED. In a few regions the practice of capturing them continued to be considered as “tr...