PARISky and bees

Night has fallen over Paris and traffic has slowed down. Sacré Cœur, the famous church on the hill of Montmartre, is lit up brightly on the skyline and the searchlight on the Eiffel tower makes its rounds over the sprawling cityscape, endlessly looking for something.
From my balcony on the eighth floor I enjoy the rare luxury of a good view on this mellow summer's evening just after midnight, surrounded by a dozen tomato plants and various other balcony garden experiments. A dead end of the nearby Canal de l'Ourcq that connects Paris with the countryside to its north-east, lies calm and pitch-black next to a long row of elm trees below. A lone, fluffy cloud reflects the luminous city back onto itself against a dark blue-purple sky, dotted with barely a handful of lonely stars whose flickering lights hardly make it though the layers of air and light pollution.

Another feature of this 8th floor flat in the 19th district on the edge of "intramuros" Paris, is the fact that 4 floors down lives a lady who has an even greater luxury than our balcony - as the only one in the whole apartment building, she has a large terrace twice the size of our living room. And there – what else would one be doing with such a terrace in Paris! – she hosts many thousands of individuals of a very particular species that has recently become very dear to me: honey bees. She has seven bee hives! And since I have been taking weekend courses on beekeeping for a few months now, we have become friends and colleagues in the art of beekeeping. Well, let's rather say: I'm learning a lot from her, who has been doing this for over twenty years in the countryside and three years ago decided to bring some of her hives into the city. The use of her terrace, which was a great, quiet place for dinners, barbecues and other occasions before, has since been sacrificed entirely to this passion of hers and as a result of the enormous activity of the hives she installed there, one now has to take certain precautions when venturing onto it: covering one's hair is the minimum, so the bees don't get caught in it. Better would be: the awkward astronaut-like outfit of a beekeeper.


[the following evening:]

Tonight I'm on the balcony before sunset, after a heavy summer's rainfall, which washed the city clean and cleared the air - like a shower after a heavy argument. One last remaining dark cloud is slowly moving northwards, leaving in its wake a sky full of snippets, stripes, fluffy balls and veils with a quarter of a moon already peaking through and swallows sweeping overhead, chirping gaily.

This apartment is really all about the sky - I often forget, but it's true. As a matter of fact, I spend far too little time here… but that's another story.

I wanted to write about the bees last night, but didn't get too far before I fell asleep…
In my first contact and experiences with bees I objected to the full-body-suit with the cage-like head cover, thinking "that's for people who're not really connected with these intelligent beings, who're simply in it for the honey/money - IIIIII don't need that!"
Haha - how I was wrong! My first few "interventions" (as the French call it) were hence with bare hands, in t-shirt and only a straw hat with a thin veil. It felt good - I didn't get stung, the bees were calm and so obviously: my theory was proven right!
But then a I helped the afore-mentioned neighbour a few weeks ago to check on her seven bee-hives. As she insisted that I should be well-protected, I wore fingerless woollen gloves and a long-sleeve shirt. We opened two small hives, took out a few frames and things were ok - I could simply shake off the occasional curious bee. But as we opened the biggest one to check on their honey production, we moved too hastily, they got irritated and then it all happened very quickly. One or two stung me, I screamed, moved my hands like a madman, the smell of the venom spread by the movement, which got all the others even more irritated and they  launched a large-scale attack - within less than a minute I had at least 15 stingers stuck in my almost bare hands, my lofty gloves and on my arms…
But we had to finish what we were doing, so I tried to calm down, we closed up the hive and withdrew from the balcony back into my neighbour's flat, killing dozens of bees on the way, as they were trying to follow us. It was carnage - a dreadful sight.
While I initially had almost no physical reaction apart from slight swelling, later that evening I was feverish, exhausted to the brink of breakdown and I had to throw up. I was deeply ashamed of my foolishness and of the fact that so many bees had to die to teach me this lesson.

Now I am the proud owner of a yellow beekeeper's outfit with a astronaut-like head-cage-thing and a pair of thick leather gloves. But of course, foolish as I am, there's still a part of me that believes that one day, with "my own" bees, I will be able to have a relationship that enables me to touch them with bare hands.