I’m in Slovenia.

Beekeeping is one of the national obsessions here, along with blueberries, buckwheat, and motifs of chickens.

I had been keen to try buckwheat honey ever since reading about it in Richard Taylor’s “The Joys of Beekeeping”. Here I was excited to find it in the honey shops, of which there are many. It is called ajdov med. It is a dark, slightly bitter, distinctive honey.

Today we visited the Apicultural Museum, which is in the small town of Radovljica. It’s around 1.5 - 2 hours’ walk from Bled, and our footpath took a nice route through acres of flower meadows, which would probably have been loud with buzzing if it hadn’t been raining.

We still met bees on the way. Here is one who settled on Richard’s T-shirt before we transferred her to a clover:

Honey bees here are “Carniolan”: Apis mellifera carnica. This is a different subspecies from the “Italian” honey bee, Apis mellifera ligustica, which is the main honey bee now found in the UK, and different again from the original native British honey bee subspecies Apis mellifera mellifera. The differences are subtle. Perhaps the bees I’ve seen here are just a little darker than those at home, and their stripes a bit sharper. The Apicultural Museum described the Carniolan bees as “grey”, but I think that’s only relative to the other subspecies, as they mainly look golden brown like our own.

Walking through the countryside, you see bee houses containing multiple hives piled up in rows, each hive painted a different colour from its neighbours.

Bee house near Bled

Bee house in Bled

Mobile bee house on the route to Radovljica

We assumed there must be some way of opening the hives without unstacking the whole pile to access the lower ones, and indeed there is, as was revealed by a display model at the Apicultural Museum. There are doors in the backs of the hives, giving access to frames stacked “cold way”, which can be individually slid out horizontally.

As illustrated by the Bled bee house above, the hives traditionally have front panels with painted images. Dozens of originals were on display in the museum, and hundreds of replicas are available in the tourist shops. I resisted acquiring one, though I did succumb to a small fridge magnet version.

Beehive panel with chicken motif

Beehive panel with a description pleasingly translated into English as “Rabbit and fox make toast”.