To bee or not to bee

Yesterday, after our riverside picnic, we met Virginie and Geremy on the rooftop of the Museum of Civilisation.  They are beekeepers and we watched while they opened the museum’s resident beehive so that they could add an extra level to the hive. “We saw that the family was becoming a bit crowded,” Geremy explained, “and so we need to give them more space to grow to stop them swarming away from the hive in search of a new home.”

Virginie gently lifted out a frame to see if we could spot the queen.  She’s slightly bigger than the other bees but she was still tricky for us non-apiarists to find.

After the hive had been upgraded to a more spacious duplex, we got chatting to Virginie.  She works as a beekeeper all summer in Québec and then uses her savings to travel around the world for the winter.  She waxed lyrical (excuse the pun) about the time she spent some months in Torino, Italy and then went on to tell us about her latest project.  She visits North African countries to photograph women so that she can tell their stories in a future exhibition. In order to really find out about their lives and be able to photograph them in a meaningful way, Virginie lives with the women so that she experiences their daily routines and habits first-hand. She loves the freedom that travelling and following her interests brings her but she said that travelling by herself can sometimes be a lonely business. To be an independent traveller or not to be, that is the question.

As we said goodbye to the pair, I noticed a cool tattoo on Virginie’s ankle.  It was a bee, of course.

Le grá,
Gill