British expat learns his French As, Bees and Cs

Vaud-based IT developer Paul Foley stumbles upon a novel way to improve his French and discovers an engrossing hobby. The British expat, hailing originally from Derbyshire, tells Swisster how he took up beekeeping to improve his knowledge of the language of Molière - and to meet more Swiss locals. "About three years ago, I decided I wanted to meet more Swiss people, and improve my French,” says Paul Foley, a 36-year-old IT developer at Capital International in Geneva. Foley has lived in Switzerland for seven years. 
He was looking into just how to do this when he happened to see a beekeeping demonstration put on by the Vaud beekeeping society. “I decided that taking one of their beekeeping courses was as good a way as any to achieve those goals.” 
Foley lives in Vaud with his wife Christine, who is Swiss-German, their two daughters (one and a half and four), and two cats. 
Was there anything in his background in Derby, England, that could have predisposed him to being drawn to a beekeeping course? “Maybe because my family lived in a village where there was an old beekeeper who kept his hives in the back garden amid a jumble of flowers. I liked to visit him, and I remember that my uncle, who had a chrysanthemum nursery, considered the proximity of these bee colonies to be an excellent thing.” 
Otherwise nothing in particular, says Foley, adding that he wasn’t particularly into food either in his youth although once he won a prize for some bread he baked. 
As Foley speaks, I notice parallels between his memories and the atmosphere in his own home. The garden out back doesn’t have hives in it (Foley’s keeps his seven bee colonies on the edge of a forest in a nearby farming area). But it is bursting with vegetation including a number of edibles, to the extent that Christine Foley is about to embark on some cottage production of her own: chutney making, with the 36 kilogrammes of fruit their kiwi vine produced this year. 
And for his family’s breakfast (and to lead me later through a tasting of his honeys) he has taken the trouble to go to the bakery to fetch Swiss braided bread called Butterzopf or tresse so fresh it is still warm. 
“Anyway, after that course I was hooked,” Foley continues. “And I began activity as a beekeeper by helping to look after the hives in Prangins (VD)”, just outside Nyon and not far from where Foley lives. “The Château de Prangins is renowned for its kitchen garden, so having bees around to pollinate is essential.” 
From there, Foley went on to acquire his own colonies of “reasonably well-tempered and disease-resistant” Carnolian bees. “Normally, they produce three types of honey every year. Spring honey, from colza; what I call ‘Summer 1’, which is forest honey; and ‘Summer 2’ which is largely sunflower and clover.” 
In a good year, he gets 40 to 60 kilogrammes of each type of honey, which he mostly sells in half- kilo jars for 10 francs each. 
In the basement of his house, Foley has a workshop and a processing room filled with interesting items including a stethoscope for listening through the walls of the wooden bee houses “to make sure they’re inside and all’s well, without disturbing them.” 
When Foley removes frames with honeycombs from the hives, he brings them back here, cuts the combs out and puts them into centrifuge, a cylindrical stainless-steel piece of equipment with a handle which he turns in a process called spinning. 
The resulting liquid honey that comes out of the tap is then strained twice. “The only thing that can get through the filters is pollen,” Foley says, “but it rises to the top during a five day maturing process, when the honey is left to sit in this piece of equipment called a ‘maturer’” – another stainless steel cylinder with a lid. 
“Because some people are allergic to pollen, we make sure to get all the pollen out – by scraping off what has risen to the top during the maturing process – before putting the honey in jars,” says Foley. He and his family eat that top layer, he says, “because it has so much extra goodness.” 
In 2008, Foley tells me as, back upstairs, he leads me through a honey tasting session, the weather was such that sunflowers and clover had separate seasons so well defined that the bees produced a sunflower-only ‘Summer 2’ honey as well as a clover-only ‘Summer 3’. 
The spring honey is very sweet, with just a whiff of the distinctive smell of colza flowers that fill fields with their vivid yellow color in May. The summer flower honeys have a stronger flower taste and somewhat less sweetness, while the forest honey is a superb balance of sweetness and bitterness from its subtly-layered medleys of sylvan aromas. 
I don’t think I have ever tasted better: the attention, care and love that Foley puts into these organic products feels palpable in the sheer deliciousness of the end product. So sales must be booming? “Yes,” Foley replies, “largely through word of mouth, my website www.1279honey.com, and so far one shop near Zurich, the Cheese Club Fine Food Emporium in Thalwil.” 
The “1279” in the web address is the postal code of Chavannes-de-Bogis, where Foley’s hives are. Foley says he intends to stay in Switzerland, and to expand his hobby by acquiring more hives, increasing honey production, launching new products like beeswax candles, and building up a network of sales outlets.