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at the Ljubljana airport in Slovenia in
2017, he expected to quietly grab his suit
case at the baggage carousel and make his
way home. Instead, when he walked into
the arrival terminal, he was greeted by
crowds of people cheering, applauding
and waving the national flag. Kozmus is
not a sportsman, a celebrity or a famous
politician. He is a beekeeper.
And on that morning in 2017, he was
returning home with a delegation from
U.N. headquarters, having successfully
petitioned officials to declare May 20 a
global day for bees. “It felt as if we were
heroes,” Kozmus recalls. “It was like
we were athletes returning with gold
medals.”
In Slovenia, beekeeping is a way of life.
In this small European nation of 2 million,
1 out of every 200 people is a beekeeper.
That is four times as many as in the Eu
ropean Union as a whole. Honey features
in many Slovenian dishes, and Slovenes
use “api therapy” (honeybee products) to
treat illnesses and chronic injuries. Not
even the corona virus, which has infected
more than 1,400 people and killed at least
96, has slowed down the country’s dedi
cation to keeping bees. During the lock
down, the government deemed beekeep
ers essential workers, permitting them to
travel freely to tend to their hives.
Bees are themselves essential work
ers in making life possible for humans.
They pollinate our crops and play a key
role in balancing our ecosystems, glob
ally. “Bees hold our ecologies together,”
says Andrew Barron, a neuroethologist
who studies how nervous systems gen
erate natural behavior in animals.
If they disappeared, goes an apocry
phal quote often attributed to Albert Ein
stein, “Man would only have four years
of life left.”
And bees are at risk. Europe’s bumble
bee populations, for instance, fell by
17% from 2000 to 2014, while in North