L'Arbre aux Abeilles

"It's bee honey, not beekeeper honey. In Yves-Elie's words, "It is honey as the bees make it for themselves."

As beekeepers, Yves-Elie and Chantal choose to harvest only the surplus honey, which the bees do not need. This honey concentrates the plant diversity of their region. 

Both are passionate about the local black bee, endemic in Europe for over a million years. In 2006, they settled in Pont-de-Montvert to practice beekeeping that respects bees. With this in mind, they created L'Arbre aux abeilles, an association with the aim of participating in the preservation of the black bee in the heart of the Cevennes National Park. With the help of beekeepers and volunteers, they are in charge of the conservatory La Vallée de l'abeille noire, which now has more than 150 colonies.

The particularity of the honey produced by their bees comes from the fact that they have adapted modern frame hives to the management of a traditional sedentary trunk hive. Thus, each honey of the Arbre aux abeilles is a range of aromas linked to a place, an altitude, a terrain. The apiaries are spread out from the top to the bottom of the Cévennes. Chantal and Yves-Elie, for educational purposes, also keep a few trunk hives (built in hollowed-out chestnut tree trunks), covered with lauze stones, witnesses of a secular practice.

They have also carried out restoration work on ancient trunk hives, not only for their historical and cultural value but also because they wish to rehabilitate them in order to give back to the local bees an artificial habitat that was theirs for centuries.