Custos Apium by La Revasserie

Custos Apium by La Revasserie Micro enterprise building and selling species appropriate beehives AKA Ruches de biodiversity.

Another wilding hive waiting for a swarm.It could be wishful thinking given that it's halfway through June (normally per...
15/06/2026

Another wilding hive waiting for a swarm.
It could be wishful thinking given that it's halfway through June (normally perfect swarming time) but feels like halfway through July and is already as dry as halfway through August... Swarming has been at least stuttering if not disjointed and low ebb, as there's so little out there for the bees, who don't seem very interested in propagation this year.
I should add, that the bees we are interested in are the wild living bees, not the sugar fed honey cows preferred by the commercial beekeeping industry and all those that follow their bee farming practices...which is for some reason the path that most small scale beekeepers take.
Those bees are artificially boosted in numbers by the Beekeepers feeding and tend to swarm long before any wild living bee colony.
If they are allowed to do so that is...but that's another story.
Wild living bees follow the flows and the weather affects the flows.... climate change affects the weather and natural systems get very confused.
So yes this low swarming is probably for the best given the insane weather and lack of flows.
The bees will continue to work towards building up winter stores before the summer dearth.
But this odd hive is still better off up in a tree out in the woods than in a dark corner of my atelier.
Even if it picks up a small late cast swarm that doesn't make the winter, they will leave some comb and bee scent for the next bees that come along.
I will call it Ellis after the landowner who has lent us a nice Beech tree in which to place the hive.
This hive is situated on the eastern side of the Courcelles wilding project and is now part of it.
If populated will push the projects nesting cavities a further 400 Meters East of the original abandoned hives and 300 metres North-east of the 2020 beechtree custos apium wilding hive.
A nice corner from where the bees in the future can skip over the wet valley and into another section of woodland further to the east again where we hopefully can start the next phase of this project in 2027.
The wilding project and why wilding honey bees is important for the future of bees in a world of ever more poor quality farmed and molested honeybees is explained in detail this wonderful book.

15/06/2026

I missed all the excitement....
This is one of my Apiary hives, up in the little woods and 3 meters up a chestnut tree...I switched it last year from a nearby tree stand after it swarmed and didn't requeen for some reason.
In its new position it sat quietly until the middle of last week when a few scouts showed up at 3 of the empty hives close by.
By Friday they were concentrating on only this hive and by Saturday lunchtime the interest was waning.
Yesterday I didn't get to visit the hive and today there are bees. They have installed themselves.
Having seen the scouts last week I must have looked at every corner of these woods and the surrounding hedgerows...but nothing.
The scouts rapid dismissal of the other 2 empty hives got me thinking that they were from further away.
It would have been nice to see a swarm coming in from some wild colony in the surrounding forests.
They look pretty rustic.
But I missed them.
BTW.
It's very rare for my hives to catch swarms from nearby colonies here in the Apiary.
They normally disappear into the forest if I can't grab them first.

12/06/2026

Another swarm in ...
This hive is a deadout from last year and part of the Courcelles project.
I filmed it 3 hours ago and there was extreme scouting.
I've just been informed that a swarm is in....

12/06/2026

There's swarms moving at the moment here in La Creuse.
This is a rebooted custos original hive that I replaced a corkboard hive with 10 days ago.
A serious ant infestation problem meant a corkboard hive needed switching out.
It's replacement attracted scouts within 3 days and is now occupied.

Yesterday Maevá Dramet from the Conservatoire des Races d' Aquitaine visited again, this time to collect samples from s...
12/06/2026

Yesterday Maevá Dramet from the Conservatoire des Races d' Aquitaine visited again, this time to collect samples from some of the beehives both here at home and out in the woods around the nearby Courcelles project.
She will test the DNA of these bees for Apis mellifera mellifera genetics.
It has been known for years that there are sustainable populations of wild living bees across the French countryside as well as in many other European countries.
It's seems that these bee populations are located in areas where the black bees are historically located...of course they were once widespread across northwest Europe and the British isles.
This is unfortunately now much less so, with pure black bees in only a few locations, but never the less it's looking increasingly possible that where the sustainable bee populations are, there are also black bees involved in the mix.
Are these sustainable populations, likely to rooted in the local AMM genetics? This is what we are trying to find out.
AMM bees have particular hygienic and other behavioural traits that seem to assist their ability to live in wild situations... just as they always have done.
If the AMM genetics are indeed present it's a good indicator to why there are many sustainable wild living bee populations.
Some of these colonies are observed for over a decade in the same nest sights and others are getting there year on year...one or 2 colonies have possibly been present for decades.
All are from wild living bees, not managed or manipulated in any way.
Some colonies here at home are introduced to hives, but are from previous swarm arrivals to other hives.
The hives are of many types including a wall cavity and a 40+ year-old decrepit dadant, which is slowly rotting into the forest floor.
All other hives are Custos Apium Ruche Biodiversity of various types.
We are trying to piece together the reasons why these particular local bees of La Creuse are it seems, a sustainable local population of wild living bees.
Their genetics could well be an important factor along with the environment their freedom from beekeepers practices and of course their hiving.
We were joined by Lucy who's land on which most of the Courcelles project is located and Febien who has a small farm nearby on which we plan to extend into and place more wilding hives.
Many thanks to Maevá who is the black bee project manager at the conservatoire des races d' Aquitaine and drove here from Bordeaux, managed not to get stung by being very relaxed and gentle with the bees and returned many hours later with a hefty Custos Apium loghive/observation hive in the back of her van for her black bee project...a long day.
This wilding project can be read about in the book ' Abeilles Mellifères le peri du réensauvagement ' by Stéphane Bonnet.
Published by terra vivante. (French)

Yesterday was a near perfect day for swarming, and sure enough we found a nice cluster hanging at the far end of the gar...
08/06/2026

Yesterday was a near perfect day for swarming, and sure enough we found a nice cluster hanging at the far end of the garden in the early evening.
Assumed they were from our nearby hemphive, but more likely not on closer inspection. but could just as easily have arrived from further afield...that is hives that sit about 400mtrs away on a nearby property.
Oddly there was zero scouting anywhere at the baited empty hives around the place.
The swarm was medium size and had no weight to it.
The bees themselves for the most part striped with some yellowish banding...
Which isn't the kind of bees I have here, until now.
Running low on beehives I introduced them to this old skep on a box I had sitting unused in the barn.
The skep itself is quite late... probably 1940s or 50s it's nice and tight and woven of Juncus effusus ( I think??) A grass that's common in wet fields hereabouts.
Old comb shows bees were once using this hive.
I added the heavy box underneath for more volume, but then never used the beehive because it needed a little cabin to protect it from the weather... which I didn't have spare until now.
The bees walked in easy enough...at 7pm
And are now orientating so I guess they will be okay.
I can pack insulation around this hive and add a swing door to the cabin before winter.
These last few days there have been a few swarms in the locality...since the chestnut and bramble flows have kicked in.
So again once this stormy weather has passed I'm expecting there will be more bees on the move.
Or not....

This 35/40 ltr observation loghive is Finished and waiting for its new owner.It has a window at the rear of the hive for...
08/06/2026

This 35/40 ltr observation loghive is Finished and waiting for its new owner.
It has a window at the rear of the hive for observing the bees.
And the interior has been left as nature intended...rough.
This is the third loghive I've made from a naturally hollow trunk I acquired some years ago.
I'm not sure if it's oak or chestnut as it's extremely heavy and as hard as nails...
The large ' rust top' roof will keep the water off and is removable via 2 pins.
Inside the roof a thick heavy port can be removed to allow a swarm to be introduced if necessary.
Sometimes it's difficult to sell a special hive because it's so good....I want it for myself.
This is one of those.

Well it's about 1/2 way through our swarming season and it's just not happening.The heatwave and dry period off the back...
01/06/2026

Well it's about 1/2 way through our swarming season and it's just not happening.
The heatwave and dry period off the back of an unseasonable cold wet week is having knock on effects ...it's over 2 weeks now without rain and this baking sun, has really put the brakes on things.
The meadows next to our Apiary are usually humming with all sorts of insects during the end of May and first weeks of June...
It's an old lay meadow and full wild flowers.
Right now it's like standing dry hay with next to no insects apart from the odd butterfly.
This is how it usually looks by late June.
So no nectar flow to be found in the fields... around here at least.
There is some bramble where the farmers haven't smashed the hedgerows and the bees are into it, I'm looking
around the treelines to see where the bees are headed...
This is a really serious dearth just
At the wrong time.
They are busy enough so there is something out there for them.
But they don't look like they are thinking about Swarming anytime soon.

Nice swarm...but this is from 10 years ago when the swarming season sort of started and ended at roughly the same times,...
18/05/2026

Nice swarm...but this is from 10 years ago when the swarming season sort of started and ended at roughly the same times, year after year.
We had an early swarm in this Quince
every year just as it flowered.
This is no longer the case as climate change is altering weather patterns and flora and fauna adjusts to ever unpredictable situations.
Here in central France we are coming to the end of a couple of weeks of cold and wet weather which has really put the brakes on the bees doing their thing and propagating as they should via swarming.
We had a new record (for bees in our region finding our hives) when an early swarm found one of our wilding hives back on April 8, this during an unseasonable mini heatwave.
Since then swarming has been sporadic to say the least...and the weather also.
Here in La Creuse we wake up to 3c, cold air all day, and heavy showers.
The woodburner is again fired up.
There has been the odd swarm when the sunshines for more than an hour, and one of our hives had an arrival last week.
Looking forwards and a weather change is predicted later this week, so if you have a waiting empty hive, check to see if hornet queens haven't moved in, and refresh the lure as it's looking like bees will be bees moving again in the near future...and with the predicted warmth I think is going to get very swarmy.

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