Gorazd Trusnovec inspects a beehive at the B&B Hotel Ljubljana Park in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Thanks to this article by David Segal, with photographs and video by Ciril Jazbec, we realize now that even after our dozens of links to articles about bees, one key point was never on our radar. Our beekeeping/honey-making friends in Costa Rica inform us that the opposite is an issue here–in the entire country there are only 800 beekeepers and most of them are small scale hobbyists, and that a national authority (SENASA) controls the density of hives per area:
Mr. Trusnovec at home. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping,” he says.
The Beekeepers Who Don’t Want You to Buy More Bees
In Slovenia and around the world, conservationists try — and mostly fail — to combat the widespread belief that honey bees are in danger.
When the B&B Hotel in Ljubljana, Slovenia, decided to reinvent itself as an eco-friendly destination in 2015, it had to meet more than 150 criteria to earn a coveted Travelife certificate of sustainability. But then it went step further: It hired a beekeeper to install four honey bee hives on the roof.
“Keeping wild animals is a great way to show that we have a connection to nature,” said the general manager, Adrijana Hauptman Vidergar. “And we’ve had great feedback from guests who go up there and take a look.”
The hives are managed by Gorazd Trusnovec, a 50-year-old with a graying goatee who is the founder and sole employee of an enterprise called Najemi Panj, which translates to “rent-a-hive.” For a yearly fee, he will install a honey bee colony on the roof of an office, or in a backyard, and ensure that its bees are healthy and productive. Customers get the honey and the pleasure of doing something that benefits bees and nourishes the environment.
That, at any rate, was Mr. Trusnovec’s original sales pitch. In recent years, he and other beekeepers, as well as a broad variety of leading conservationists, have come to a very different conclusion: The craze for honey bees now presents a genuine ecological challenge. Not just in Slovenia, but around the world.
“If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” he said, after a recent visit to the B&B bees. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.”
It’s like Johnny Appleseed announcing, “Enough with the apples.” That’s a jarring message, and not just because honey bees play a crucial role in the food chain, pollinating about one-third of the food consumed by Americans, according to the Food and Drug Administration. It’s also because there is a widespread and now deeply rooted belief that the global population of honey bees has been running dangerously low for more than a decade…
Read the whole article here.
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