From honey bee to honey – from a curious and inquisitive student to a professional beekeeper

The train journey from Sevnica to Ljubljana is long enough for one to have time to think and observe. Along the way, colourful boxes, beehives and traditional bee houses – the homes of small, hardy insects – often caught my eye. Out of curiosity, I borrowed the book From Honey Bee to Honey in the University library, and this book pushed me from the bookshelf theory to practically researching the biology of  honey bees on a daily basis. However, a beekeeping book cannot sweeten the tea and the decision was made: I bought two honey bee colonies and a beekeeper’s suit and enrolled in the elective subject of Beekeeping as an Agronomy student at the Biotechnical Faculty in Ljubljana.

Constructive debates and a positive encouragement from the professor were a good way of starting a more serious beekeeping route. Student years were also a time when I realised what made me happy and fulfilled and I decided what I really wanted to do. And when your work inspires you, it encourages you to learn more, and it inspires creativity in you, everything falls in its place … I started with two, continued with seven, and today I am a beekeeper with 250 bee colonies.

Beekeeping is not just a profession. Sara, then my girlfriend, now my wife, joined me in this lifestyle as well. We started by producing royal jelly and raising bee queens for our own purposes. Due to a combination of circumstances, after eight years of successful intensive production of royal jelly, we are now turning almost exclusively to breeding queen bees. Our excellence is not in the tradition, as one would almost expect from beekeepers, but in a different and fresh view of beekeeping, sometimes out of the box. Our beekeeping is based on the biology of bees and is based on careful observation and the pursuit of high quality bee products. So we decided to be organic.

Our vision is to return to nature, to maintain the genetic purity of our Carniolan bee and to enable it to show its best characteristics. More than a decade has elapsed since the first drop of honey that we produced, which we, at that time, proudly and with great anticipation presented to our family members. During this time, our Medeni Studenec produced honey, pollen, propolis, royal jelly and various mixtures of bee products.

In 2019 our first queen bees from organic beekeeping flew into the world and so was a new brand MS Carnica Queens was born. In this new challenge and venture we continue to strive for excellence and the best quality, which will be verified by independent tests and certified with an organic certificate.