Beekeeping has been a way of life for Peter Kozmus since he was 14 years old. He had been part of a beekeeping club at school, and when his mentor decided to retire and sell his bee colonies, he jumped at the opportunity. “My dad was a bit surprised,” he laughs, “but luckily he made it possible for me to set up the hive and I’ve been a beekeeper ever since.” Today, Dr. Kozmus is a world-renowned beekeeping expert, vice president of the International Federation of Beekeepers’ Associations Apimondia, head of the breeding program at Slovenian Beekeepers’ Association and what can be best described as a bee diplomat, advocating for bees at home and abroad.

It’s a career path that only really makes sense in Slovenia, a Central European country of two million inhabitants, over 11,000 of whom are beekeepers — the highest amount per capita in Europe. With its own indigenous Carniolan honey bee and over 230 years of beekeeping tradition — Anton Janša, the first beekeeping teacher at the Habsburg court, is considered a pioneer of modern beekeeping — Slovenia is a world leader in the field. 

“Being a small country can be a benefit, because we only have one national beekeepers’ association,” explains Dr. Kozmus, who also serves as chair of the Beekeeping Council at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food. “It makes our relationship with the Ministry a lot more straightforward.” The Slovenian Beekeepers’ Association showed its influence in 2011, when its members started reporting mass bee die-offs and expressed suspicions that neonicotinoids, a class of neurotoxic pesticides that are chemically similar to nicotine, were to blame. The association urged the Ministry of Agriculture to take action, and that same year Slovenia became one of the first European countries to ban their use. As evidence mounted on the negative impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees, an EU-wide ban followed in 2018.

World Bee Day, which has been celebrated on May 20 since 2018, was also initiated by Slovenia as a way to educate the global public and mobilize support. As Dr. Kozmus explains, “Beekeepers have the problem that the environment is changing in ways that aren’t friendly to bees and other pollinators. We can solve some of these problems ourselves, but for others we need help, and a World Bee Day seemed like the best opportunity and tool to get that.” This year World Bee Day focused on educating young people, which has long been a theme in Slovenia: A third of primary schools have beekeeping clubs like the one that inspired Dr. Kozmus, with over 2,000 children attending this year, and since 2018 beekeeping has also been an elective subject in the national primary school curriculum. 

For many, bees are synonymous with the Western honeybee (Apis mellifera), even though it is only one of more than 20,000 bee species recorded worldwide. Honeybees are considered the most agriculturally important pollinator, but this is due to sheer numbers — on an individual level they are less effective than wild pollinators.

“Pollinators are crucial for our food security and biodiversity,” says Dr. Danilo Bevk, researcher at the National Institute of Biology and leading expert on wild pollinators in Slovenia. “Roughly four in five agricultural and wild plants depend on insect pollination and we estimate that more than half of pollination in agriculture, and even more in nature, is done by wild pollinators. In our case those are wild bees, including bumblebees and solitary bees, as well as other insects like flies, hoverflies, butterflies, beetles and wasps.”

Between 2020 and 2023 Dr. Bevk led the first monitoring study of wild pollinators in Slovenia, setting a benchmark for future measurements. Reliable information on wild pollinators is hard to come by, and the EU is still working on establishing a uniform monitoring system, but the data we do have is sobering: A third of bee, butterfly and hoverfly species are declining in numbers, while a tenth of bee and butterfly species and a third of hoverfly species are threatened with extinction. Bumblebees, which are among the most important pollinators in the Northern Hemisphere, have declined by 17 percent in Europe and 46 percent in the US compared to a population baseline between 1901 and 1974 according to one study, and are expected to lose at least a third of suitable territory in Europe in the next 60 years.

Honeybees and wild pollinators face many of the same challenges, from rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns to pesticides, disease and a lack of food. But crucially, honeybees are livestock and their survival is protected accordingly — they are fed with sugar, treated when sick and provided with hives. “Wild pollinators can’t be fed, they can’t be treated, it’s harder to provide enough nesting places, so all these environmental changes we have caused are much more fatal for wild pollinators,” stresses Dr. Bevk.   

Honeybees can spread disease to wild pollinators and put additional pressure on them by competing for the same resources. To provide all pollinators with enough food, the Slovenian Beekeepers’ Association has been distributing pollinator-friendly tree saplings to municipalities through their local chapters since 2015, and around 20 municipalities have adopted the tradition of gifting tree saplings to newborns, which the parents can plant on their own land or on public land set aside for the purpose. “We put a lot of effort into this, because we see that bees are having a hard time finding enough food, especially in the late summer,” says Kozmus. Since 2021 the association has been organizing an annual day of planting in March, with the goal of planting two million pollinator-friendly trees and plants by 2030. The association, in cooperation with the Slovene Forest Service, supplies participating municipalities with free seedlings. In the first two years over 250,000 seedlings were planted as part of the project, and 300 kilograms of forest tree seeds scattered in a forest recovering from wildfires. 

Such planting initiatives are an important step, says Dr. Bevk, but benefit honeybees more than wild pollinators: “For wild pollinators, the conservation of wildflower meadows is most important. There they can find very diverse food sources from wild plants, to which they are best adapted, as well as places for nesting.” He sees the Slovene love of beekeeping as both a benefit and a hindrance to pollinator conservation. While many of the efforts to help honeybees also benefit wild pollinators, the popularity of beekeeping as a national pastime can lead to problems. As Dr. Bevk explains, “Slovenia has one of the highest densities of honeybees in Europe, and their numbers have been growing constantly over the past 20 years. At the same time, there is less food available due to climate change and the disappearance of wildlife meadows.” 

In urban and agricultural areas, delayed mowing is a simple solution that can have a big impact, increasing both the amount and diversity of insects present. Ljubljana, the country’s capital and home to 350 beekeepers, started implementing delayed mowing in 2020, in addition to regularly planting native pollinator-friendly trees. Now 12 hectares of meadows owned by the city are not mowed until late June. While it took some getting used to, it’s now a popular initiative, according to Maruška Markovčič from the city’s Department for Environmental Protection, who says she’s more likely to receive photos and complaints from citizens if the meadows are accidentally mowed a week too soon.

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“It’s a slow process,” says Markovčič, who notes that even fervent supporters of delayed mowing struggle to extend this thinking to the lawns in their own backyards. “It’s about understanding the extent of this approach. Your own five square meters won’t do much, but if 10,000 people have five square meters that’s already something.” A number of private companies have also joined the initiative, as have the city’s kindergartens, seven of which also run a bee-themed educational program. 

In 2016 Markovčič launched the Bee Path in Ljubljana, which is both an interactive learning path through the city and a network of 44 organizations and institutions that work with and for bees. In 2018, the project began sharing its best practices in bee conservation with nine other European cities, which eventually led to the launch of the Bee Path Cities network in late 2022. In addition to the 10 EU cities that started it all, 17 more have unofficially joined the network, with interest from all over the world. The Bee Path Cities approach focuses on the interplay between urban biodiversity, public outreach and promoting bee-related products and activities, but Markovčič attributes the success of the network to the fact that participating cities can focus on practices that make sense in their context, as long as they use a participatory approach. “It took a while for all of us working in bee conservation to realize that every little bit counts,” she says, “and these urban stories are also important for understanding the world of these incredible creatures.”