The beginnings of our bee farm go back to 1975 when, at the age of 15, I began keeping bees. I became a member of the Črenšovci Beekeepers’ Association and gradually my amateur beekeeping became increasingly more professional. Currently, we are keeping approximately 150 colonies. Some of the bees are transported to pastures in eastern Slovenia, and the remainder are used for rearing queens. We sell a great deal of the honey produced ourselves and we therefore have a registered honey extraction facility. In our spare time, in addition to producing honey and rearing queens, we make beeswax ornaments and honey liqueur.
Over the years, I have also acquired a national professional beekeeping qualification. We regularly attend classes and educational programs, which help us keep up with new developments in beekeeping and at the same time produce more honey and rear higher-quality queens.
Because working with bees brings me so much joy, I have spent much of my free time observing them. This slowly led to queen rearing – at first, only for personal use, of course. Later, this sparked the idea of commercial queen rearing. We have been rearing queens for ten years now.
From the very beginning, we have been trying to rear the best-quality queens; we are therefore working with the Agricultural Institute of Slovenia, which offers professional seminars for queen breeders. In addition, we also participate in the queen testing program carried out by the institute. Based on these tests, our queens rank in the top quality class for calmness and honey production. We rear approximately 500 queens a year.
For queen-rearing purposes, we developed our own nucs, made up of four units. Each unit is the size of one AŽ frame, divided into three parts. Eventually, we also made stands for the nucs, which makes our job much easier.
Our queen breeding station is located in the middle of
the Mura Plain, in the village of Nedelica in the Municipality of Turnišče. Several roads lead here: on the main road from Murska Sobota to Lendava, turn off towards Turnišče at Črešnovci; it is even easier if you take the Turnišče exit from the freeway that will open in August 2008. The village of Nedelica is on the right, just before you reach Turnišče.
In summer, we also welcome tourists, beekeepers, and other visitors interested in our work. We show our visitors what we do by giving them a tour of our extraction facility and the rest of the bee farm, and also offer them a taste of various types of honey and our homemade honey liqueur.