When you think of France, you think of wine (and snails and frog’s legs), right? Well, I swear there are as many varieties of honey here as there are wines. Every little grocery store we go into has four or five different varieties from the region, light, dark, and crystallized.
We’ve been reluctant to buy lots of bottles of honey, as we are living out of our backpacks more or less (we’ve rented a car for a week, but then it’s two more months of carrying everything on our backs). We did buy one small jar of crystallized honey to go with our baguettes in the morning. We chose crystallized so it wouldn’t drip on our limited supply of clothing. That’s it in the back left in the picture of our trunk-top countryside snack.
We also resisted the temptation to stay in L’Abeille Hotel (“The Bee Hotel”) in Orleans, despite the fact that the guidebook said the smell of honey still “wafts through the corridors”. I can sniff honey at home, I suppose.
Michelle found a write up of a particular apiary today here in Beaujolais that would give tours of their apiaries, Miellerie du Fut d’Avenas. It was a long, misty drive up through the hills to find it, but when we got there, unfortunately, it was closed, nobody home. We left them a note and a Hive Mind sticker.
