Thousands of bees were discovered dead on Saturday in the Pastré district, south of Marseille.
Corpses of thousands of bees strewn on the ground, near the Pastré park in the south of Marseille, this is the macabre discovery made by Cleanmycalanque on Saturday February 25. The video posted on Sunday February 26 on the association’s Instagram account reached more than 2,600 Internet users. How to explain such a hecatomb? Global warming ? 5G? Pesticide ? Everyone has their belief.
Gérard Jourdan, beekeeper in Auriol who also has hives near this sector in Marseille, in the district of Sainte-Marguerite, confirms that it is exceptional to see bees dying by the thousands at once. The specialist immediately eliminates the cold: “You have bees in the mountains in Alpes d’Huez, in winter you can guess the hives under the snow, they don’t fear the cold, as long as they have provisions.”
But in the case of this brutal mortality in Marseille, the bees were not in a hive, not even nearby. “We saw them in an alley, near the garage of the association, they were near a bush“, says Céline Albinet, communication manager of Cleanmycalanques.
He does not exclude a link with the thaw due to global warming, which could explain the premature death of old winter bees. “As the weather had been fairly good for three or four weeks, the colonies had been laying eggs for a month and a half. If the queen starts laying again on January 1, 21 days later the foragers will be born and like that every day… when they reach 10, 15 or 30 days… the old hives who have passed October, November , December in the hive will die“But they don’t all die on the same day, and even less in the same place! So, for him, the track does not hold. No more than the death of the males which also occurs in number, when they become useless after fertilization and that they are chased from the hive, but this happens in the months of May, June, never in winter.
“As the weather had been fairly good for three or four weeks, the colonies had been laying eggs for a month and a half.”
Céline Albinet, Cleanmycalanques
Proceeding by elimination, the beekeeper considers that the most probable hypothesis remains poisoning, by pesticide or insecticide. It’s already happened to one of his apiaries. “They had spent the night with a helicopter for mosquito control, but it was in June, it’s not the season.“
Gérard Jourdan has not yet been to check his Marseille apiaries. He reminds us that a bee can travel 3 km. “It may be mine who came to die there, but then why?“
Cleanmycalanques sent 30 of these dead bees to specialists to try to find an explanation. On the occasion of this sad news, the association recalls that bees are the guardians of biodiversity and that their extinction is a threat to life on earth.
