The barge Le Phalene looms like a giant night-flying moth, dark and shiny against the moonlit sky. She is a barge as large as a house, a steel hive, the only floating apiary in the world–home to six million bees and Bruno and Mireille. Every year Bruno and Mireille slowly ply the southern canals with a hundred hives of hybrid Italian bees on board. They stop long enough for their industrious workers to harvest and pollinate the early spring orchard blossoms, the fragrant May blooms of the Acacia trees, then the deeply resinous forest blooms. Finally Le Phalene settles under the summer towpath shade in the midst of a thousand acres of sunflowers, as its charges produce jar after jar of creamy golden miel de tournesol. As winter approaches, the hives are tucked away at a canal-side farm and Le Phalene continues to migrate, selling a sweet harvest of honey from Toulouse to Lyon. A cloud of scent delicately drifts from the interior workshop into the mahogany living quarters, as Mireille shows me her new honey-spice mixtures—mielépice: magic pots of richly spiced honey infused with cardamom, Jamaican pepper, rosebuds, or star anise. I stock our bistro-galley with southern sun in honey form and continue our own pilgrimage towards Toulouse and the Canal du Midi. —KH