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...