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This doesn't have anything to do with my bees but it's still interesting to me.
I didn't know it before but Notre-Dame Cathederal has a small Apiary. A guy in Paris as part of a bio-diversity program has been placing hives on roof tops in the city for several years and placed hives on top of a roof at Notre Dame in 2013.
The bees this guy keeps are "brother adam" which aren't very popular in the US but are known for being gentle. This line of bees was developed by a benedictine monk named Brother Adam who started bee keeping in 1915. He traveled Europe, the Near East and North Africa finding parasite resistant bees and developed the Buckfast strain in Buckfast Abby after losing more than half of his hives.
They keep the Brother Adam bees for their nature, because there is apparently some blowback due to honey bee swarms in the urban area. A lot of the urban beeks don't do splits and hive management and end up with alot of swarms.
I also learned reading about this that St. Ambrose is the Patron saint of bee keepers. The story has something to do with a swarm of honey bees landing on his face when he was a baby sleeping in a crib.
I just found it interesting that one of the issues with the fire yesterday was removal of the bee colonies.
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