Passage V

Paris: Where Apiary Meets Opera House

In the 1980s, during time off from a backstage job in the world of Paris opera, Jean Paucton took a beekeeping course at the famous Luxembourg Gardens. Shortly thereafter, the prop expert ordered some. A hive—securely packed, sealed, and humming with life—arrived at Paucton’s workplace, the Palais Gamier is a preeminent opera house in the city’s historic district.

[1] Paucton’s plans to establish the hive to his home in the countryside fell through, and he found himself looking for a place to temporarily store his purchase. [2] Up on the roof, an opera house fireman suggested (who was raising trout in the huge cistern below the Palais Gamier). [3] Paucton’s bees have been cared for ever since, high above elaborate productions of Carmen, La Boheme, and Cosi Fan Tutte. [4] Now in his late seventies, the beekeeper has expanded his project to five hives. [5] The annual harvest has grown to more than one thousand pounds of honey, which he bottles, labels by hand, and sells in nearby specialty shops. (66)

For all its charm, Paucton’s story has an increasingly serious dimension. Since the mid-1990s, however, bee populations worldwide have declined dramatically. Hundreds of thousands of hives have been disappearing every year. Pesticides, pollution, parasites, and disease imperil the insects, which rank among the top pollinators on Earth. Countless crops—apples, cucumbers, almonds, avocados, broccoli, to name a few—simply won’t grow as well without bees to pollinate them.

Surprisingly, bees in urban areas, where there are fewer pesticides and a far greater variety of flowering plants and trees, are faring better—by far— then their country cousins. While the disorder, widely known as “colony collapse,” defies a simple explanation, experts and amateurs, urban beekeepers among them, have joined the effort to reestablish the health of all bees. The ramifications for the agriculture industry and for the general health of the planet are grander than the grandest opera staged at the Palais Gamier.