Paris Basin Honey

Bourré, Loir-et-Cher -- guided visits daily, April to November and the winter school holidays. The champignon de Paris is grown under the Loire now: at the Cave des Roches, growing since 1893, you go down into the tuffeau, the soft white stone of the Loire's cliffs, to see it: a working mushroom farm, a village carved in the rock and a tour of about an hour, fifty metres below the vines, twelve euros, at 10, 11, 14, 15, 16 and 17h from April to September and at 11, 15 and 16h in the autumn and the holidays (La Cave des Roches, Bourré -- French ).

Meaux, Seine-et-Marne -- tastings Saturday and Sunday at 11h and 16h from April to October, Saturday only at 11h in winter; free on the first Sunday of the month. The town's own house of the Brie de Meaux walks you from the milking to the ripening cellar and pours a commented tasting, six euros, with the Saturday market a short walk away (Maison du Brie de Meaux, 5 place Charles-de-Gaulle -- French ). At Jouarre, twenty kilometres east, what its owners call the oldest fromagerie in the Brie, founded in 1895, ripens a farmhouse organic Brie de Melun and carries in its own history a brie noir, the cheese left six months in the loft; call before visiting (Fromagerie Ganot, Jouarre -- French ).

Reims -- year-round. The gingerbread trade in France began here: by the middle of the sixteenth century there were about twenty pain d'épiciers in the trade, most of them at Reims, and Sophie Gondolle, drawing on René Gandilhon's study, writes that the Paris guild could not rival them "en raison de la qualité des miels de Champagne". The recipe Henri IV's physician wrote down in 1608 is rye flour, honey and a little pepper or cinnamon, and the honey left in the nineteenth century, replaced by molasses when its price rose (Sophie Gondolle's history of gingerbread, built on Gandilhon's study of 1959, RILEA, 2022 -- French ). The city's other biscuit, the biscuit rose of 1691, is a bread-oven economy, baked once and dried in the falling heat after the bread, which is why it is bis-cuit and why it survives dipping; Maison Fossier keeps the double baking and runs a guided trail through its biscuiterie on the rue Maurice-Prévoteau (Châlons Tourisme -- French ).

Lamotte-Beuvron, Sologne -- open seven days; the fair named for the Tatin sisters is in September. The Hôtel Tatin stood opposite the station, and the sisters who kept it from 1878 to 1906 cooked for the bourgeois of Orléans and Paris who came down to shoot in the Sologne, so the tart exists because Paris came south for the hunting. Curnonsky presented it in Paris in 1926 as the tarte des demoiselles Tatin, and the house was in the first Michelin guide of 1900. The bar keeps the sisters' range with its Gien tiles, and in July 2025 the historian Pascal Arnoux, writing on Gilles Pudlowski's blog, found the tart "fondante et savoureuse, fidèle à sa légende" (Les Pieds dans le Plat -- French ); menus 39 euros, rooms from 91. Other reviews divide on the tart. The town's own page tells the sisters' story, and flowers their grave each September before the fair (Mairie de Lamotte-Beuvron -- French ).

Close

Amiens -- Saturday morning on the place Parmentier; boats on the water gardens from 1 April to 30 October. The families who still work the hortillonnages reach their plots in the old bed of the Somme only by barge, along 65 kilometres of channels. They sell every Saturday in the Saint-Leu quarter as Les T'cho Légumes des Hortillons, and the flat-bottomed boat with one long raised end, built to land without cutting the bank, takes visitors out through the season (Amiens Tourisme -- French ). The macaron d'Amiens and the gâteau battu, a tall brioche of butter and yolks, are at the Maison Trogneux, whose own site carries 275 customer reviews of the gâteau battu, 4.7 out of 5, the dissenters saying "trop sec" (Maison Trogneux -- French ).

Chartres -- the game season, and the Semaine Henri IV at the end of February. The pâté de Chartres, famous since the eighteenth century, was made with plovers and dotterels, birds of passage over the Beauce; when the birds stopped coming the recipe took partridge and pheasant instead, and the city's cooks serve it in the game season. The city's gastronomy page carries the recipe, with the mentchikoff, a praline heart in Swiss meringue rolled by hand over three days since 1893, and the poule au pot served in the Semaine Henri IV for the only king crowned at Chartres, on 27 February 1594 (Ville de Chartres -- French ).

Close

Villaines-les-Rochers, Touraine -- La Pèlerie, the third weekend of May, free; the workshops year-round. A cooperative founded in 1849 employs about forty basketmakers in a village whose workshops are cut into the limestone, several of them Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, the State's title for the best craftsmen in a trade, and they grow the willow as well as weave it. The willow year runs on the calendar the village publishes: cut after the first frosts, bundled and graded, stood in basins to shoot again, and peeled in May and June at the height of the sap rise (Commune de Villaines-les-Rochers -- French ). La Pèlerie is the peeling done in public, by hand and by machine, with a willow hedge built in front of you and a giant basket made on the spot (Azay-Chinon Val de Loire Tourisme -- French ).

Tours -- daily except Tuesday, closed 5 to 23 January 2026; 6.60 euros, free under 26. Compagnonnage, the guild system in which a young tradesman travels town to town on the Tour de France for five years on average and earns the right to teach only by a masterwork judged by the compagnons, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2010 (UNESCO -- French ), and the only museum of it in the world is at Tours, in a twelfth-century abbey under a vault built like an upturned hull: more than four hundred masterworks from thirty trades, among them a wrought-iron grille that took fourteen years (Musée du Compagnonnage, Tours -- French ). Paris keeps the same habit in a garden: the beekeeping school in the Jardin du Luxembourg, on the Senate's own page, has taught since 1818, run since 1856 by the Société centrale d'apiculture, open to anyone who enrols, with a diploma at the end and the year's honey sold at the Orangerie in the autumn (Sénat, Jardin du Luxembourg -- French ).

Orléans -- 29 April to 10 May 2026; the sword on the evening of 29 April, the ride at 10h on 1 May. The Fêtes de Jeanne d'Arc mark her entry into the city on 29 April 1429 and the English departure on 8 May, and the 2026 edition is the 597th. The sword is handed over in the cathedral on the evening of 29 April; a young woman of Orléans, chosen by public candidature, rides out in armour from the place du Martroi at 10h on 1 May; the medieval market runs at the Campo Santo from 7 to 10 May (Ville d'Orléans -- French ). The festival entered the French inventory of intangible heritage in 2018, and the organisers call it among the oldest commemorative festivals in France.

The Der, Champagne -- any day; the churches are unlocked. South of the Lac du Der about fifteen villages have churches framed entirely in oak, because Der is the old word for oak and it was the only building timber the wet Champagne had; the same frame runs through the houses, the square-courtyard farms and the barns. Most were glazed by the sixteenth-century glass masters of Troyes, and the tourist office's route names them and says push the door, they are all open: Outines, the largest, with timbers from 1512 and walls clad in wooden shingles; Lentilles, from about 1512; Châtillon-sur-Broue with the only fully enclosed porch (Office de tourisme du Lac du Der -- French ).

Close

Chartres, Amiens and Reims -- nightly, free: Chartres 11 April 2026 to 3 January 2027; Amiens 11 July to 12 September and again in December; Reims Fridays and Saturdays at 22h45 from 29 May to 19 September. Chartres lights twenty-one sites from nightfall, the scenes looping so that no one misses a start (Ville de Chartres -- French ). At Amiens the subject is specific: paint found during restoration showed the whole sculpted west front was coloured from the thirteenth century, and Chroma puts the colour back on the stone for fifty minutes, with the historian Michel Pastoureau advising on the restitution (Ville d'Amiens -- French ). At Reims Regalia re-stages the day of a king's coronation on the cathedral front, with a second show on the basilica of Saint-Remi on Sundays and Mondays from 7 June to 20 September, no booking (Reims Tourisme -- French ).

Vitry-sur-Seine and the 13th arrondissement -- any day, from the street. Vitry counts its art in two layers: about 150 commissioned works under the one-per-cent rule, two or three added a year, a Sonia Delaunay mosaic at the ice rink and a Dubuffet among them, and more than two hundred murals by some fifty street artists since Christian Guémy, C215, set up his studio there in 2009 and drew the rest in (the town's own map of both layers, Ville de Vitry-sur-Seine -- French ). Across the river, up to twenty-six giant works line the boulevard Vincent-Auriol, seen for nothing from the pavement or from the elevated metro line 6.

Joinville-le-Pont, on the RER A -- Sundays, April to October. The guinguette is this region's own invention, a dance floor, an orchestra and a meal on the riverbank, and it survives in a handful of places on the Marne loop, chief among them Chez Gégène, open since 1918 and the subject of Bourvil's 1952 song about a plumber's Sunday on the Marne. Several dozen people still dance the musette there every Sunday; François, ninety, a retired engineer, has come every Sunday for sixty years and explains the decline himself: once everyone had a car, people went further afield. The floor and the band are the reason to go; the meal, on its reviews, is not.

Close

Paris and Fontainebleau -- any day; the Cabinet des médailles on the rue de Richelieu, the château daily except Tuesday. On 12 June 1804, a month after the Empire was proclaimed, the Council of State met to choose its emblems, and Cambacérès argued for bees, because France was organised around one chief as a hive is. The eagle took the arms and the bee took the mantle, purple velvet sown with gold bees. The Fondation Napoléon's page on the imperial symbols gives the reason the bee was chosen: gold "bees", in fact cicadas, had been found in 1653 at Tournai in the tomb of Childéric, the fifth-century father of Clovis, so the insect tied the new dynasty to the oldest kings of France (Fondation Napoléon -- French ). One of the Tournai bees survives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, 1.6 centimetres of gold and garnet weighing under two grammes, found on 27 May 1653 (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cabinet des médailles -- French ). At Fontainebleau, the throne room Napoleon fitted out in 1808 is the only one in France still in place, the Tuileries and Saint-Cloud having gone (Panorama de l'art, Réunion des musées nationaux -- French ). The hive metaphor had a scientist behind it: Réaumur gave nine of his memoirs on insects to the honeybee, and Jean Torlais's 1958 study of them opens on his line that their republics "sont dignes d'occuper un esprit philosophique" (Revue d'histoire des sciences, on Persée -- French ).

Close

Fontainebleau -- any day; heather on the platières from June to August, the forest inside the Paris fare zone. The sand under this forest was left by an old sea and cemented unevenly into sandstone slabs that broke into boulder fields as the sand beneath them washed away; and because sand drains, pools are few, which is why one of the office's foresters, Catherine Deck, singles out the mare aux Fées. In 1861 the painters of Barbizon created an artistic reserve of about a thousand hectares, which the office calls the first natural space in the world with a conservation measure, eleven years before Yellowstone; 22,000 hectares now, 1,500 kilometres of path of which 400 are waymarked, two thousand rock shelters with prehistoric engravings, two hundred marked climbing circuits (Office national des forêts -- French ).

Saint-Mesmin, four kilometres below Orléans -- any day; keep off the sandbanks. The national nature reserve created in 2006 protects about nine kilometres of river, 263 hectares with a 90-hectare protection perimeter, taking in the wooded point where the Loiret meets the Loire and the islands of Mareau, run by the Loiret Nature Environnement association (Réserves naturelles de France -- French ). The Loire's confluences with the Cher and the Indre downstream were listed under the Ramsar convention in February 2026, for some 49,000 waterbirds and about a tenth of mainland France's ospreys.

Le Hourdel, Baie de Somme -- every low tide, all year; 300 metres, and a guide accredited since 2025. The harbour seals were nearly gone a few decades ago, were protected from the 1960s and came back on their own from other European colonies, and the bay now holds the largest harbour-seal colony in metropolitan France; on one July day in 2021 the park counted 885 harbour and 312 grey seals across every site from Calais to the bay. The marine park's own page carries the counts (Parc naturel marin des estuaires picards et de la mer d'Opale -- French ). The county tourist board's seal page gives the rule: the seals haul out on the sandbanks at low tide twice a day, keep 300 metres, a disturbed mother can abandon her pup in summer, and since 2025 the prefecture accredits the guides who take you out (Somme Tourisme -- French ).

The Sologne and Chambord -- the rut from mid-September to mid-October, five free viewing areas and five free hides; guided listening from 45 euros, booked by phone from 1 June. More than 346,000 hectares of the Sologne are designated under the European habitats directive, the largest terrestrial Natura 2000 site in France, and the State's own page names the threat as the abandonment of the traditional uses, extensive farming and fish-farming, that keep the ground open. The four heaths, dry heather, ling, wet heather and the cross-leaved heath of the bogs, are the floor of the region's honey, and a State scheme recorded in 2016 placed hives on them in exchange for their restoration, because beekeepers wanted the heath kept. Chambord puts its herd at about 700 red deer and opens the reserve for the rut at dawn and dusk (Domaine national de Chambord -- French ); the stags roar in the weeks the heather and the oak honeydew are being taken off the hives.

Close

Verzy, fifteen kilometres from Reims -- any day; best bare, from November. The Faux de Verzy are beeches that grow low and twisted, branches falling to the ground and rooting, a variety of the common beech. The site was classed in 1932 on thirteen and a half hectares, and the national forestry office's reserve of 1981, enlarged in 2021, now takes in more than nine-tenths of the faux in the forest, a stand the office calls unique in the world for its extent and its natural regeneration, with a stony path through it (Office national des forêts -- French ).

The Marais Audomarois, near Saint-Omer -- by flat boat; check the season with the boatmen. UNESCO's biosphere reserve here holds one of France's two remaining wetland floating-garden systems, shaped by market gardening since the seventeenth century and still worked (UNESCO Man and the Biosphere programme); the other is the hortillonnages of Amiens, ninety kilometres south, so both of the country's surviving water gardens are in this region. About a hundred families live on the islands, 160 kilometres of channels are navigated by the flat-bottomed bacôve, the marsh holds a third of the aquatic plant species found in France, and the rare aquatic warbler feeds here on migration.

Close

Chartres, Amiens, Reims and Beauvais -- any day; Beauvais's choir under scaffold. UNESCO's own text for [Chartres](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/81/) calls its west front an authentic example of the art created at Saint-Denis; [Amiens](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/162/) was built in under a century, 1220 to 1288, by three linked master builders; [Reims](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/601/), with the Tau palace and Saint-Remi, is the coronation church. Beauvais is the sequence's limit: its choir, at 48 metres the highest Gothic choir in the world, was built from 1225 and part of its vaults fell in 1284; the nave was never built, and a crossing tower finished in 1569 at about 150 metres fell four years later (Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais -- French ); the choir has been under consolidation for decades, with 17 million euros committed in January 2025 for its 800th anniversary.

Chambord and Villesavin, Sologne -- Chambord daily; Villesavin's garden from spring, check the season. François I ordered the wall of Chambord in 1542 as the boundary of the ideal city he imagined, and at 32 kilometres long and three to four metres high it makes Chambord, in the culture ministry's words, the largest walled park in Europe, now the monument's protection perimeter and the fence of its wildlife reserve (Ministère de la Culture -- French ). Inside that wall the estate's black-bee colonies mate, and the honey sold at Chambord is certified from them. Nine kilometres away, Villesavin, built from 1527 by the man who oversaw Chambord's construction and still lived in, opened a melliferous garden on its old kitchen garden in spring 2025 with the Sologne black-bee conservatory (Val de Loire Tourisme -- French ).

Reims, the crayères -- booked visits year-round. The chalk under Reims was quarried for building the city from the tenth century, and the pits, cut down from the surface as shafts like upturned funnels up to 35 metres deep and joined by 57 kilometres of galleries, were empty when the champagne houses moved out to the hill and gave them a new use, Ruinart first in 1768; [UNESCO listed the hillsides, houses and cellars in 2015](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1465/). Ruinart's visit goes about forty metres down for two hours with a tasting; Taittinger's goes eighteen metres down by 116 steps through fourth-century workings and the remains of the abbey of Saint-Nicaise.

Provins -- year-round; the ramparts free, the monuments on a pass from 9.50 euros. [UNESCO's inscription of 2001](https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/873/) is the mechanism: the town's layout, merchant houses, vaulted cellars, warehouses and walls survive because of the Champagne fairs held here, and the pass covers the Tour César, the tithe barn, the guided underground galleries and the priory (Provins Tourisme). Provins was a honey name before the Gâtinais was: the Paris price list of 1793 quotes miel de Brie from Meaux, Provins and Rozay.

Close

Vaux-le-Vicomte -- every Saturday from 16 May to 26 September 2026, gates 17h30, fireworks 23h; 22 euros, booking obligatory. Two thousand candles are lit on the house and across the 33 hectares of Le Nôtre's formal garden, the fountains play until 20h30 when the water allows, and the evening is staged as a return of the party of 17 August 1661 that Fouquet gave for Louis XIV. The château says it was the first to open at night by candlelight, in 1980, and runs shuttles from Paris and from Melun station (Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte -- French ).

Paris, the Catacombs -- reopened 8 April 2026; 31 euros, two hundred people at a time. The quarries under the city were open to the public from 1809 as an ossuary, 1.5 kilometres of gallery twenty metres down out of some 280 to 300 kilometres that exist, the rest closed by prefectoral order. The site closed in November 2025 and reopened in April 2026 after conservation work, the administrator saying the galleries were never meant for 600,000 visitors a year and the load and humidity were degrading the bones (Ville de Paris -- French ). The inspection that still manages the ground under Paris was created by Louis XVI on 4 April 1777, after three hundred metres of the rue Denfert-Rochereau fell into the workings in 1774.

Rungis -- the first Friday of each month, on a 149-euro box; Nogent-sur-Marne, from the outside. Les Halles left the centre of Paris for Rungis in 1971, and the wholesale market's own page admits individuals by one door only, the Rungis Prestige box, with visits coordinated on the first Friday of the month (the market's visit page, Semmaris -- French ). The other end of the same move stands at Nogent-sur-Marne: the last of the twelve iron and glass pavilions Baltard built for the Halles, saved when the rest came down, re-erected by the town and listed in 1982, which the State had refused to do while the pavilions stood in Paris; it is a hire hall now, seen from the street inside the original Halles railings.

Lèves, outside Chartres -- Fridays at 14h30, by reservation. The Ateliers Loire, founded in 1946 by Gabriel Loire and run by the third generation, make stained glass in slab glass set in cement, a technique of the founder's, for some four hundred buildings in France; the workshop opens for a guided visit every Friday at 14h30, and the garden is a Vitrailleraie, an open-air museum of the house's panels (C'Chartres Tourisme -- French ).

Close

The Sologne's honey country -- a car and two nights; mid-September to mid-October for the rut and the heather harvest. Start at Chambord for the wall, the deer and the honey certified from the estate's own black-bee colonies, and at Villesavin nine kilometres away for the melliferous garden opened in 2025. Then Yvoy-le-Marron, which the department made its Sologne apiary village: Les Ruchers de Saint-Marc taste their crus at a bar à miels in the shop, mornings, call before you go (Val de Loire Tourisme -- French ), and Bernard Gaucher, here since 1990 with about 400 hives moved within seventy kilometres, sells honey, gingerbread and mead from a forest farm beside a chestnut grove of two-hundred-year-old trees he took back into cultivation in 2015, groups by appointment (Miels et Châtaignes de Sologne -- French ). End at Saint-Viâtre, where the Maison des Étangs explains the pond system and the fish-farming that keeps the heath open, guided at 10h15, 14h15 and 16h15 from April to October, and the village nets its pond on the last Saturday of October with mulled wine on the bank (Maison des Étangs -- French ); La Ruche de Sologne sells from the same village by appointment and at Lamotte-Beuvron's Friday market.

The Champagne harvest, as a picker -- late August to mid-September; offers published from about June. Each autumn pickers are hired across the Marne, the Aube and the Aisne for two or three weeks, paid the legal minimum wage. The reason there is work is a sentence in the appellation's rules: any means of harvest that cannot bring in whole bunches is forbidden, so the grapes are cut by hand and travel whole to the press in perforated crates, and a prefectoral order fixes the day picking ends. In the abbey village of Hautvillers above the vines, a beekeeper runs a two-and-a-half-hour visit from hive to jar, suit, apiary, extraction and tasting, twenty euros, telephone to arrange it (Office de tourisme d'Hautvillers -- French ).

The Pentecost walk across the Beauce -- 23 to 25 May 2026; registration closes days before. Two pilgrimages cross the wheat plain in opposite directions on the same weekend, a hundred kilometres over three days, and pass each other. Notre-Dame de Chrétienté walks Paris to Chartres in chapters of about fifty, its 44th edition in 2026, with a shortened route for those who cannot manage the distance and, in the president's words, an average age of twenty-one (Notre-Dame de Chrétienté -- French ); Pèlerinages de Tradition walks the other way, an opening Mass at 7h45 on the cathedral parvis, forty kilometres to Rambouillet, forty more, thirty into Paris, with a children's column at twenty a day (Pèlerinages de Tradition -- French ). Both descend from the student pilgrimage Charles Péguy walked alone in 1912 and Sorbonne students took up in 1935, which grew to twelve thousand. For the reader who arrives on any other weekend, the cathedral uncovers its labyrinth for walking every Friday from 10h30 to 16h45, Lent to All Saints, 261 metres of single path in eleven rings, shoes obligatory (Cathédrale de Chartres -- French ).

Beekeeping -- enrolment in September for the Paris year; one Saturday in June for the Touraine day. A year's course in the Jardin du Luxembourg or a day in the Touraine. The beekeeping school in the Senate's garden, teaching since 1818 and run by the Société centrale d'apiculture since 1856, enrols in September at the apiary, runs theory from January to mid-March and practicals from mid-March to September on its twenty-three colonies, and ends in an exam and a diploma; it is volunteer-taught and open to anyone. Three kilometres from Chenonceau, a professional beekeeper whose hives stand at Villandry, Azay and the Clos Lucé runs a seven-hour day for six to twelve people, one Saturday in June: a hive opened in the morning, frames harvested, extracted and potted in the afternoon, kit provided, a picnic at the apiary, 110 to 165 euros, with a three-day beginners' course beside it (Le Rucher de la Dame Blanche, Civray-de-Touraine -- French ).

Close

One itinerary out of Paris and back, spoke by spoke. The honey is the reason to go; the rest happens along the way.

Paris -- year-round (city gateway); the Luxembourg sale one morning in late September. Start on the rue Vignon at half past nine, where La Maison du Miel has sold the honeys of the French regions since 1898 and publishes the six tests it runs on every harvest, the last a pollen map to catch a honey sold under the wrong origin (La Maison du Miel, 24 rue Vignon -- French ). In the Marais, Miel Factory sells single-flower honeys by the spoon from a tasting counter, one beekeeper to one honey; its founder told this site the shop's Paris honey comes from the Bois de Vincennes, mostly lime, once a year and in very small volume (Miel Factory, 28 rue de Sévigné -- French ). And in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the beekeeping society sells the year's harvest from its apiaries at its September honey fairs, from nine in the morning until the honey runs out, and tells you to bring a bag (Société centrale d'apiculture -- French ). The city's hives have multiplied: the regional biodiversity agency counted about 650 in 2019 and 1,500 three years later, fifteen to the square kilometre, and recommends apiaries about 2.5 kilometres apart for the wild bees' sake, without asking for the hives to go (Agence régionale de la biodiversité Île-de-France -- French ). The honeys are judged each November: the society's Concours des miels d'Île-de-France, its 25th in 2026, with the jury sitting at Saint-Maurice on 14 November, open to any beekeeper in the region with a registered apiary number (Société centrale d'apiculture -- French ). And at Montreuil, east of the city, the town-hall roof carries hives you can visit for nothing, one hour, April to September, booked through HelloAsso (Les Ruchers de Montreuil -- French ).

The Gâtinais -- Friday and Saturday; the first harvest is the hawthorn's, in April. South from the Gare de Lyon, through the Fontainebleau sandstone and the Gâtinais park, to the honey country that once set the Paris price. At Rozoy-le-Vieil, on the canals east of Montargis, the Rucher des 4 Vallées opens its shop on Friday and Saturday morning, with a free tasting, more than five hundred hives moved out each year to the Oise, the Berry and the Marne for lime, chestnut and lucerne, so that the whole basin is on one shelf (Tourisme Loiret -- French ). At Fay-aux-Loges in the Forêt d'Orléans, Les Ruches de Fay sell at the miellerie, the extracting house, on Saturday mornings, bees that follow the flowering, in the beekeeper's words, from the Beauce to the Sologne, the banks of the Loire and back to the Gâtinais (Les Ruches de Fay -- French ); the Gâtinais honey house at Boutigny-sur-Essonne takes three harvests without moving a hive, hawthorn first, and its hours differ by source, so telephone (Visit Paris Region). Between them: Milly-la-Forêt, the seven-lock staircase at Rogny, and the gingerbread at Pithiviers, kept by a confrérie, a brotherhood of its makers. At Château-Renard, east of Montargis, the Musée vivant de l'apiculture gâtinaise, a family apiary, opens every afternoon from early April to the end of August by appointment only, seven euros (Musée vivant de l'apiculture -- French ); its founder, the beekeeper Jacques Goût, told France 3 that "c'est la proximité de Paris, Paris qui a imposé les modes, qui a rendu célèbre le miel du Gâtinais".

The Sologne -- harvests in June and August; the rut from mid-September; the honey bar in the mornings. Chambord sells the honey of its own apiary in the château shops, certified from Sologne black-bee colonies, an acacia and a forest honey of oak honeydew, potted cold in small jars of 126 to 132 grammes (Domaine national de Chambord -- French ). Twenty-five kilometres on, Yvoy-le-Marron, the village the department made its Sologne apiary village, has the bar à miels, a honey tasting bar, at Les Ruchers de Saint-Marc, mornings, call before you go (Val de Loire 41 -- French ), Bernard Gaucher's forest farm with its gingerbread and mead by appointment, and the department's public black-bee apiary; Saint-Viâtre has the pond house and La Ruche de Sologne by appointment, and Lamotte-Beuvron the Friday market and lunch at the Maison Tatin, the hotel the tart was born in, open seven days, menus from 39 euros. Telephone the appointment-only addresses; the gates are otherwise closed.

The Loire -- the day course one Saturday in June; the shops year-round. The Sologne runs out at Blois, whose Saturday market by the Prefecture carries the Sologne honeys, and the river carries you to Amboise, Chenonceau and the tuffeau cellars of Vouvray and Montlouis. The tourist board calls it honey from the châteaux of the Loire: Le Rucher de la Dame Blanche at Civray-de-Touraine, three kilometres from Chenonceau, keeps hives at Villandry, Azay-le-Rideau, the Clos Lucé and the Bourdaisière, sells the honey in their shops, and runs the beekeeper-for-a-day course above (Touraine Val de Loire).

Champagne -- the visit through the season; the vendange in September. East from the Gare de l'Est to Epernay and onto the Route touristique du Champagne, the region's signposted route, up the Marne to Hautvillers, the abbey village above the vines, where Le Miel de Bacchus sells its honey and runs the two-and-a-half-hour hive-to-jar visit, twenty euros, own car to the apiary, a honey stop on the wine route itself; the shop opens Friday afternoons and no booking channel is published for the visit, so telephone first (Office de tourisme d'Hautvillers -- French ). The lucerne honey of the chalk plain is on the Rozoy shelf and in the Champagne houses' summer jars; the crayères of Reims and the timber churches of the Der are the road on either side.

Close