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Golden nectar on a bee farm

03.02.2022 18:57

The village of Opátka Homemade products

According to experts, bees have been around for about 8 million years. Humans have been collecting their honey ever since they discovered it was sweet, nutritious, and otherwise beneficial. Forest beekeeping (wild-hive beekeeping) is an ancient way of obtaining bee products. It turned into beekeeping in today's sense when humans began to raise bees to take full advantage of all their benefits. And that is what beekeeper Michal Šimko and his wife Miroslava do on their farm (called “MiMi”) in the village of Opátka near Košice.

At first, it was purely a hobby, one that gradually grew into craft and products. It was not, however, an easy path, because if you want to do it well, there is a lot to learn. Observing nature, the weather - what grows, what blooms and, accordingly, being able to anticipate that, for example, linden will bloom in 40 days, which is the main period of collecting. They have to prepare the bees for this so that the queen can start mothering enough bees to collect pollen. If there is no one to fly out for it, there will be no honey. Nothing is ever completely certain with bees. Something that’s true today doesn’t have to be so in a week. Sometimes one hive works well and another just doesn’t. There is no manual for that. Over time, the beekeeper develops a relationship with the bees and a feel for recognizing what they lack. For example, old beekeepers could tell only by the sound bees made whether everything was fine in the hive. A lot of skills will only come to the beekeeper with experience.

"For us, it's more about preserving crafts and traditions, about our mission to do something good for our planet, for the environment, because really, bees are important and without them, there would be no life on Earth. What they do for us is completely unique and we benefit from their honey - as well as their other products. There are certainly ups and downs, though - when the year is good, we always feel like expanding the number of hives, but there are also years when there is no honey at all. That’s when we even sometimes think about packing up. In the end, however, there is always some encouragement from customers and we again feel that we are probably doing something well. We always change our minds then and keep going. Personally, I can no longer imagine my life without bees," concludes the beekeeper with craft in his heart.