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In the context of climate change, some
experts say this model may ward off is-
sues associated with extreme weather
patterns. Other countries, including the
U.S., have a mass industrialized approach
to beekeeping, where colonies exist in
much denser settings than they would in
nature and are moved around larger plots
of land, leading to greater risks of disease.
“In the U.S., beekeepers have thousands
of hives,” says William Blomstedt, a U.S.
beekeeper living in Slovenia. “But here,
people will have fewer hives—maybe a
couple dozen or a hundred—but they can
actually care for and monitor their bees.”
The AZ hives are now catching on in
the U.S., and amid growing global inter-
est in Slovenian api-practices, the govern-
ment created the Beekeeping Academy of
Slovenia in April 2018, to educate bee-
keepers from around the world on Slo-
venia’s bee practices.
But as weather becomes increasingly
unpredictable, Slovenian beekeepers are
having to deviate from the script their an-
cestors left them. “What it means to be a
beekeeper is changing,” says Ambrozic,
who noted that Slovenia has just had an
unusually late snowfall, affecting how the
bees forage. “We need to think bigger.”
That means looking beyond Slovenia’s
borders and building an international co-
alition. The success of the neonicotinoid
campaign taught Slovenian beekeepers
that they could be advocates for bees
worldwide. Peter Kozmus traveled the
world with a delegation of his compatriots
to convince other countries, from the U.S.
to South Korea, to support the inaugura-
tion by the U.N. of a day devoted to bees.
After three years of lobbying, the
U.N. General Assembly unanimously
proclaimed May 20 as World Bee Day
in 2017. Individuals and organizations
working on bee conservation now come
together on that day to raise awareness
about the importance of bees for our ecol-
ogies and food systems, and to brainstorm
ways they can collaborate across fields
and borders. “We do not want World Bee
Day to be a celebration because we don’t
have anything to celebrate right now,”
Kozmus says, noting that bee populations
worldwide are plummeting. “We want touse this day as a tool to inform people that
bees are important.”
Experts say that these kinds of efforts
by Slovenia to foster international inter-
est in bee conservation have been success-
ful. “North America, generally speaking,
is following suit by thinking about bees
as charismatic creatures,” says Geoff Wil-
liams of the Bee Informed Partnership, a
Maryland-based nonprofit focused on
saving honeybees. “Slowly, there is huge
interest developing in preserving bees.
We’re following their early steps.”
For Kozmus, protecting the bees has
taken him around the world. But in the
Kozjansko valley, he still tends to his
100 bee colonies alongside his wife and
three children. The panels on his apiar-
ies, like most in Slovenia, are colorfully
painted with wildflowers and iconic
symbols of Slovenian beekeeping: a por-
trait of Jansa, images of student bee-
keeping clubs and proudly painted let-
ters that spell out World Bee day. The
imagery offers a reminder, Kozmus says,
that together the world can take action
to curb global heating, ban dangerous
pesticides and put an end to ecologi-
cal degradation. “Every person can do
something for the bees,” he says. □^
In part because of climate change,
U.S. honeybee colonies fell 37% in the
past year; in Slovenia, they rose