Haute-Savoie. The beekeepers’ slump at the Annecy Apple and Honey Festival
Apples, donuts, blood sausage, cider, snails, accordion, puppets, and even the sun… You could find everything at the Apple and Honey Festival, this Saturday, November 6 on Annapurna Square, in the Novel district. Almost everything! The big absentee of the day was honey.
“When you have nothing to sell, you don’t come”, philosopher Yann Forest, looking around the square, counting for the stands offering honey to the many onlookers who have come for a walk. The speaker of the festival is heartbroken: only three beekeepers out of the usual ten came to set up their stall this Saturday, November 6.
“The same concerns as the winegrowers”
And for good reason, local beekeepers suffered the vagaries of the weather last year. Between the spring frost and the rain this summer, the bees had very few flowers to forage: the flowers, fragile, do not secrete nectar below 20 ° C. “We produced a third of what we usually do, about a ton and a half,” notes bitter Pierre Marigo, based in Mieusy.
“We have some of the same concerns as the winegrowers,” he explains, his black hat screwed on his head. To get by, he must sell the reserves built up in the event of a hard blow. And the future is uncertain: “There is death to come this winter… The bees are less vigorous, the queens stopped laying very early this summer and did not have the strength to resume. “
There is also concern from Baptiste Bel, a transhumant beekeeper based in Sillingy. Its 400 beehives are scattered between Ain and Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. “What saves me is the transhumance,” he said, giving change to a client. But there will not have to be other hard knocks in the months to come, ”warns the beekeeper.
If the harvest was nil in Haute-Savoie, there was a better yield in Ain and Isère.
But Baptiste Bel is more optimistic than his colleague Pierre Marajo: the mild autumn has restored dynamism to his bees …