In his "Rendezvous at the farm", Fanny Agostini evokes Thursday morning the current very tense situation of beekeepers, for whom the spring period is crucial in the year. The inability to sell honey also puts a strain on their cash flow.
We salute a certain number of professions in these difficult times, but there is one that is not honored as it should be, it is beekeeping!
Watch the apiaries emerging from their wintering, replace the colonies that have weakened during the frost, change the queen, move the hives on the crop fields ... The beekeepers are on deck and must keep their mobility and keep busy from their hives. Why is it important? Because spring has started, everything is blooming and budding in the wild and this is the key time of the year when the bees have to be off!
Because if there is no pollination, there is no fruit and vegetable production?
Bees allow the reproduction of plants and fruits up to 30% of our food tonnage, so they are essential to our food. The intervention of beekeepers is crucial if we want to be able to maintain our food production, because wild bees alone are not able to do all the work in the crop fields.
Beekeepers also fear suffering from the current situation to sell their honey ...
Essentially the small producers who sell their spring honey on the markets to this day still closed. The UNAF, National Union of French Beekeeping, is appealing to all honey lovers by warning about this rupture linked to confinement which already has major and unprecedented consequences in terms of survival of apiaries, not like in recent decades following losses of livestock, but for the first time in the history of beekeeping at the level of the impossibility of selling honey. It is therefore necessary in this context and in order to support the beekeeping sector, to modify our eating habits by favoring short circuits, by getting closer to each beekeeper to know what their delivery and sales methods are in place. During this confinement period, let's support our beekeepers and say thank you.