A great start to the season, before the heat waves burn the flowers and dry out the vegetation: like many harvests in 2026, the honey harvest is in sharp decline, with bees put out of work from the start of summer.
“It’s more and more capricious and it plays out every year depending on the climate. We have uneven harvests,” reports Henri Clément, a beekeeper in Lozère and spokesperson for the National Union of French Apiculture (Unaf), to AFP.
This organization, which represents professional and amateur beekeepers, estimates French production between 18,000 and 20,000 tonnes this year, after 23 to 25,000 tonnes in 2025, which was a record level for 20 years, according to its figures published at the end of the week and established from feedback from its members and traders.
Another organization, the InterApi inter-professional association, estimates the 2026 harvest - not yet finished - at some 33,700 tonnes, 5,000 less than in 2025, an amount calculated from a survey of 986 beekeepers.
If the figures differ between the two groupings, the diagnoses are the same. With a mild and humid winter of 2025-26, “the bee colonies resumed their activities, sometimes from mid-January, early” and “the season promised to be under the best auspices with vegetation which had benefited from excellent hydrometry”, underlines Unaf.
But “the heatwave periods”, from the end of May, “have strongly penalized several summer honey flows”, indicates InterApi. “The repetition of weather hazards makes harvests difficult to anticipate and weakens the bees,” underlines the organization.
In France, the honey harvests extend from March (rosemary in the South) until November (arbutus in Corsica) and the largest is from April to July. However this year, “from the beginning of June, the bees were not able to work as usual because of the heat waves,” explains Henri Clément.
Spring honey, rapeseed and all flowers, “saved the season for several beekeepers,” he says. But the lavender, the fir, the summer heather were “confidential”. And sunflowers, which represented more than half of production until the 1990s, produced almost nothing this year.
The Asian hornet, the bane of beekeepers, has certainly also suffered from the heat, but its “pressure remains significant in almost all regions”, notes InterApi. This predator of insects, particularly domestic bees, arrived in the southwest of France in 2004, probably after the importation of pottery from China. It is now present throughout the country.
France has 2,000 beekeepers who only make a living from this activity, around 4,000 “multi-active” professionals and 65,000 “family” producers, who distribute the pots to their loved ones and represent 40% of national production, according to Unaf. A dispersion which makes exact production estimates difficult.
One thing is certain: domestic production (of which only a few tonnes are exported) is lower than consumption. France imports in particular from Asia, Ukraine, Argentina, Turkey, etc.
Since June, all jars of honey mixtures sold on French territory must detail each country of harvest, in accordance with a European directive which aims to combat imports into the EU of adulterated honey via the addition of sugars.
Honey production in France was halved between the mid-1990s, when neonicotinoids were introduced, and the mid-2010s, according to the CNRS. These pesticides were banned in France for agricultural use in 2018.
