concrete honey (Miel Béton)

Jammed between a stack of papers from my last overseas trip, which I’ve only just begun to sort, I found a scrap of paper from an Italian restaurant in Berlin, where I ate pizza with my cousin in January. On it she had written “Miel Béton” and “Olivier Dernier (Darné) – bee keeper” and I remembered that it was something interesting she had heard about at the workshop she went to that day. So I googled it and discovered “concrete honey”.

Olivier Darné is an artist and designer, but about ten years ago he begun an investigation with bees, and installed a beehive on the top of his house in Saint Denis (a northern suburb of Paris). Since then he has installed beehives on the roofs of buildings in Paris and other cities, as part of a project using the bees as “prospectors” of the urban environment. He asked:

“What, exactly, could bees tell us about our city, about the relationships between wild and urban, between humans and their surroundings, between space and time?”

He discovered that in this concrete honey, the (by)product of the bees’ prospecting, there was a condensed record of social organisation and urban biodiversity.

“If you consider that 3000 hectares (or 5000 acres) of city are concentrated into a single pot of honey, the resulting flavours are a gauge of how we urbanites live.”

Because Saint Denis has a very multicultural population, the plants from which the bees get their pollen are hugely varied, and in fact the honey has been found to be similar to that made in equatorial countries. It was described as miel de voyage, or “traveled” honey.

It is a really fascinating way to map a city – for the city itself to become somehow tangible in the different flavours of this honey. A residue of the changing landscape: the varying uses of land and buildings, the passing seasons, the people who live there and the plants they grow; from flowers on balconies, to weeds on vacant blocks. Every time the honey is harvested, it has a different flavour and colour, a reflection of these nuances of change. And interestingly, because Miel Béton is a polyfloral honey, it can be harvested in much greater quantities than conventional honey, and is in fact much purer because there are few pesticides used in the city.

I find the nomadic activity of the bees very interesting and perhaps inspiring, maybe as a kind of method or model which could be appropriated to my own practice of moving through the city, on the look out for the fleeting and ephemeral (the flowers amongst the concrete). Somehow, it also seems to engage with ideas of making the invisible visible and of surveying as a form of observation. It’s a process of transformation; maybe even a kind of alchemy, in which the concrete of the city is turned into liquid gold.

(mmm… I would love to taste some!)


This is where I found my information:

A YouTube video, in french, but you can see how the beehives are installed
A really good article, also with a recipe for honey caramel lollies!
Darné's website, I think, but again in french
A blog post
A little post on this hugely interesting blog
And another nice blog with a post on Darné