‘They do sting you just for fun. I was shocked’
Beware the rooftop bees of Paris, warns Griff Rhys Jones – who found out the hard way
You may not be aware of this, but there are beehives on top of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris. I was impressed and I learnt two things up there. One was that Parisian honey is the finest in France. This is because the bees of Paris “feed on pollen from so many interesting plants in les parks, les pots and les roof-jardins, les roses, le lavendere and les herbes… so the flavour of the honey is parfait”.
The apiarist himself told me this. And the second thing was that bees do sting you just for fun. I was shocked.
We expect these kindly and industrious insects to have a grudge, or be intent on protecting their honey store or their hive. And I couldn’t help noticing that this bloke I was talking to, Pierre, the stage manager, was covered in bees.
He didn’t actually have a beard of bees. You will have marvelled at men with the living hipster whisker accoutrement of insects, I am sure. Not him. But he had a Dusty Springfield hairdo of bees. A beehive of bees, in fact.
He told me he had gone for the beehives on the roof only because his mate, the stage carpenter, had started rearing trout in the basement. I thought: “Of course, the basements of the Paris opera! They are all flooded. [Remember The Phantom of the Opera?] Wow.”
This enterprising chippy had stocked them with prize rainbow trout and was flogging his catch around the 6th arrondissement. (There is no money in opera, so the spin-offs matter.) I’d quite like to see an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about that: The Fish Farmer of the Opera,
in which a bloke in a dinner suit, maddened with lust for a salmon…
As a result of this enterprise, French opera had enjoyed an outbreak of diversification and now there were, frankly, a hell of a lot of bees swarming about this rooftop. They were doing what bees do: buzzing loudly, performing that clever dance to show where the disco is happening, and making honey.
No need to be afraid, I thought. Take the bees in your stride. Be prepared for a bee-quiff. Don’t alarm the bees and they will leave you alone. And as we chatted, the bees tired of adorning the stage manager’s Barnet Fair and landed on me too. One of them decided to sting me. I can see it now. It settled on my forearm. It crawled about a bit and then, as if casually experimenting with its sword of doom, stuck its long barb right in the fleshy bit.
Why did it do this? As we all know, that jab was probably the death of the poor thing. I think it must be like giving a five-year-old a machine gun and saying: “Don’t fire it. This will damage someone.” At which the five-year-old nods sagely and… “Blam, blam, blam.” They just can’t resist giving it a go.
Perhaps this was a juvenile bee with a similar outlook. Or maybe it was outraged by my abysmal French.
It had undoubtedly been told by the Queen Bee, or maybe Prince Charles d’Abeille or whoever was in charge of hive discipline. “Non! Don’t sting these guys. They are just sitting there talking nonsense.” But the juvenile bee thought: “What the hell.” And stung me.
It hurt badly. A bee sting up there could have been fatal. The shock might have made me leap backwards, straight off the side of the roof. Luckily, I was in the middle of my TV interview, so I didn’t flinch. I stared fixedly, nodded and winced. The viewers didn’t notice. They just thought the stage manager had said something especially apposite.
So if you are in Paris in the springtime, which looks like the next time you will be allowed to go, buy a jar of honey from the opera house. It is the best in the whole of France and a rare souvenir.
And at least these weren’t African killer bees. I went to gather honey from them in Zambia and was told that, after 11 stings from them, you start vomiting blood. But this is a different story for another hive in another part of the kingdom of insect life.
No need to be afraid, I thought. Take the bees in your stride. Be prepared for a bee-quiff