Tapada Nacional de Mafra: a former king’s hunting camp now dedicated to bees.

Tapada Nacional de Mafra: a former king’s hunting camp now dedicated to bees.

13 Apr 2018

13 Apr 2018

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Tapada Nacional de Mafra: a former king’s hunting camp now dedicated to bees.

We met with Luis Estrela before sunrise in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon. The lawyer by trade and beekeeper by choice served us a generous breakfast before introducing us to his outside office due to a change in lifestyle and new career choice. He recently decided to dedicate his life to a cause dear to his heart: beekeeping. Hence the outside work environment.

After gulping our fully caffeinated pingados, we followed Luis’s pick-up towards the spectacular entrance of the national park, close to the city of Mafra. The path leading to the forest was surrounded by a few majestic buildings. As soon as we walked into the site, we were amazed by its baroque atmosphere, and for good reason: Luis told us that it used to be the hunting ground for Portuguese monarchs from the 18th to the 20th century.

Luis’s modest office is located at the entrance of the site: a pretty wood shack filled with nature-related artifacts, more specifically beekeeping. This General Headquarters is right beside a clearing where few benches welcome curious outsiders and students participating in Luis’s seminars. This is where he does research and explains the reasons that led him to protect bees to anyone who is willing to listen.

After learning the fundamentals of a hive through a mock-up, it was time to face the bees. We got on the back of Luis’s truck and he drove us to the highest point of the park, where we found a small white house at the end of a laneway surrounded by plane trees: it was the Casa do Mel (the house of honey). The whole team put on a full-body gear and we walked towards the hives in our funny-looking outfits. We picked up long branches of eucalyptus on our way, that would be later used as a fuel to fill the hives with smoke in order to notify the bees of our arrival.

We were enjoying the smell of eucalyptus smoke, but our smiles quickly disappeared when Luis opened the hives and hundreds of bees started flying around us with a roar far more intense than the one we usually hear on the Ferreira’s roof in Montreal. Our fear quickly changed into a silent amazement when Luis pointed out some bees that were being born, having a difficult time trying to pull themselves out of the alveolus that had welcomed them in the past few days.

That unforgettable experience was followed by another memorable one. Back at the Casa do Mel, we had the chance to sample a variety of honeys, whose taste differed according to which pollen were closer to the hive. We were very surprised to notice how different each honey harvest tasted from another and how unique each of them were. We finished the tasting with the Ferreira honey (that I make in collaboration with Alvéole) and Luis told me that he really appreciates its minty taste. This amazing encounter with such an inspiring and passionate person and his bees will remain forever engraved in both my memory and my taste buds.

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