Meet Jon

Hi I’m Jon, an amateur beekeeper based in the west of France. We live on an organic smallholding and have been keeping bees since 2007, learning as we go. This blog is about our experiences to date and our future plans…

I’ve started this site for a number of reasons but mainly because we couldn’t find a site with information about keeping bees in France when we were starting out. We learnt by trial and error and thought it would be useful to share our experiences and hear from others in the same position. One of the things that we have learnt along the way is that there is no single way to look after our bees. There are many different methods and practices described across the world, all now at our fingertips with the internet (type bees into youtube and you get over 850,000 results!) so this site is simply a reflection of our view on what suits our situation and bees the best.

We also collect swarms locally and rehome on our smallholding so we’d love to hear from anyone with a newly arrived swarm – more details on what to do can be found on our Swarm Removal page.

We run an organic smallholding that supports our families needs and so it will be no surprise to hear that we do not use any chemicals near our bees. We believe that breeding healthy bees capable of living in the local environment will be achieved through natural selection and quality care and in the longer term, the benefit will be there. We do unfortunately live in the midst of arable farming with regular spraying – to limit our bees exposure we try to provide as much food as possible on our smallholding although there is little doubt that the appeal of the oil seed rape next door is pretty much invincible.

At the moment, our colonies are kept in conventional hives although we have just built our first top bar hive which we hope to populate with a swarm in 2010. Had we known about top bar hives when we started then we most probably would have set ourselves up differently, but this is a journey and an adventure and we are learning all the time.

So please join us on our journey, feel free to browse and please give us your views and feedback on what we post by writing something in the comments sections!

This work by BeesinFrance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Click here for the small print for this site….Mentions légales et copyright