Notre Dame’s bees survived!

By mbrooks on April 19, 2019

A hole is seen in the dome inside the damaged Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, Tuesday, April 16, 2019. Firefighters declared success Tuesday in a more than 12-hour battle to extinguish an inferno engulfing Paris’ iconic Notre Dame cathedral that claimed its spire and roof, but spared its bell towers and the purported Crown of Christ. (Christophe Petit Tesson, Pool via AP)

Tradition says the candles of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was created from the beeswax of bees living in the cathedral.

The bees survived fire.

Notre Dame housed two beehives on its roof, totaling about 120,000 bees.

The fire did not reach to the area of the roof above a rose window where the hives were placed.

These beehives arrived on the Notre Dame roof in 2013.

Beyond being burned the fire, the extreme heat of the fire did not affect the beehives.

Beekeeper Nicolas Geant told CNN how deadly the heat could be. He says if the heat was great enough to melt the wax, the bees would have died.

“Wax melts at 63 degrees, if the hive had reached that temperature the wax would have melted and glued the bees together, they would have all perished,” Geant says.

This Instagram picture from a Parisienne pet store shows the location of the beehives on the roof of the Notre Dame Cathedral.

A post shared by Beeopic 🍯 (@beeopic) on Apr 16, 2019 at 11:41am PDT