Beekeeper, biology teacher, market stall on Saturdays
Maja Kovač
keeps fourteen hives on two rooftops and a school garden in Ljubljana.
Honey by the season, a beginners' course every spring, swarms collected for free, and a newsletter about what the bees are doing this week.
In numbers
The apiary, counted
On two rooftops and the school garden
Three harvests, three colors
All of them rehomed, none of them sprayed
Across six spring courses since 2020
The bees seem to prefer the teacher
The hives
Where the bees are
Every apiary, harvest, course and swarm gets a cell. Click one for the whole story and the pictures.
The year
What the bees do, and what I do
The same twelve months every year, give or take a fortnight of weather. The ring is where we are now.
- Winter cluster
- Build-up
- Swarm season
- Flow and harvest
- Feeding down
The bees: Clustered tight around the queen, eating stores slowly.
Me: Listening at the wall. Building frames in the garage, marking mock exams.
The bees: The queen starts laying again on the first warm days.
Me: Hefting hives for weight. Ordering foundation and jars.
The bees: First pollen from willow and hazel, brood expanding fast.
Me: First quick inspections. Course sign-ups open at the school.
The bees: Colonies doubling; drones appear.
Me: Adding boxes. The beginners' course starts on the first Saturday.
The bees: Swarm season: queen cells everywhere.
Me: Weekly checks, splits, and the phone ringing about swarms.
The bees: The linden flow; supers filling in a week.
Me: First harvest, pale and floral. Exams at school, so the extractor runs at night.
The bees: Chestnut and meadow flow; the hives at their heaviest.
Me: Second harvest, darker. Market every Saturday. Term over.
The bees: The flow ends; guards on the doors against wasps.
Me: Last harvest. Varroa treatment starts. Two weeks by the sea, hives left to it.
The bees: Winter bees being raised; colonies shrinking on purpose.
Me: Feeding down. Term starts. Talks season begins.
The bees: Drones evicted; propolis sealing every gap.
Me: Mouse guards on. Wax rendered. Jars labelled for the winter market.
The bees: Quiet. A cleansing flight on a sunny noon.
Me: Strapping lids down. Writing the winter newsletters.
The bees: Clustered, silent, alive.
Me: Not opening anything. Reading. Planning next year's splits.
About
Two jobs, one calendar
Monday to Friday I teach biology to fourteen-year-olds. The rest of the week, the bees teach me.
I caught my first swarm in 2017 off a lamp post outside the school, in a cardboard box, with thirty students watching from the windows. It went into a hive on the roof of the science block and it is still there, six queens later. There are fourteen hives now, across that roof, a second one in Trnovo and the school garden, and a Saturday stall at the central market where I sell what they make and answer the same three questions all morning.
I like both jobs for the same reason: you cannot rush either of them, and both are honest about whether you did the work.
Weekdays
- Biology, years 8 to 10
- The school apiary club, Thursdays
- Marking, with honey in my tea
- A bus, two books a week
Weekends
- Fourteen hives on two roofs
- The Saturday stall at the market
- A beginners' course every spring
- Swarms, whenever the phone rings
Maja, Ljubljana
What I offer
By the month
Everything I do, and when in the year it is actually possible.
Honey
$12 a jarThree harvests, three colors: linden in June, chestnut in July, meadow in August. At the Saturday market and by the case from the door.
Beginners' course
$260Six Saturday mornings at the school apiary, a suit provided, one hive between two people, and your own frame of honey at the end.
Swarm collection
FreeFree within the city. Send a photo; if it is bees and not wasps, I come the same day with a box.
Hive hosting
$40 a monthTwo hives on your roof or in your garden, looked after by me, a share of the honey and a lesson a season for you.
Talks and school visits
$180An hour with the observation hive and a jar to pass around, for classrooms, libraries and offices.
Filled cells are the months an offer is on. The bees set the calendar; I only read it out.
Off the frame
Life between the two jobs
Six frames lifted out of the year. Click one to see it whole.
Now
This month
As of March 2026, written from a desk in Umeå
- On the roof
- Feeding the fourteen down for winter, one hive at a time, and finding two queens that need replacing before October.
- In the jars
- Chestnut, the dark one, and the last of the meadow. The linden sold out in three Saturdays.
- Writing
- The autumn newsletters, and a worksheet on bee genetics for year 10 that I will pretend is not about my own hives.
- Looking for
- A third rooftop in the east of the city, flat, with a stair I can carry a full box down.
- Not doing
- Opening any hive after the first frost, whatever anyone's app says the temperature is.
Notes
Pinned to the shed door
Maja came for the swarm on our balcony forty minutes after I sent the photo, talked the whole time, and left us a jar. My daughter wants a hive now.
Tina Zupan Balcony, ŠiškaI did the course at fifty-eight thinking I was too old to start. Two seasons later I have three hives and I text her photos of queen cells like a proud parent.
Jure Novak Course of 2024The two hives on our office roof have done more for morale than the ping-pong table. She comes on Fridays and half the company goes up to watch.
Katja Horvat Office roof, CenterShe brought the observation hive to our library and forty children went completely silent for an hour. I have never seen that happen.
Andrej Bizjak Librarian, VičCV
The paper trail
The classroom and the apiary, in order. The full version is one click away, as a page or a PDF.
Years 8 to 10 biology, the Thursday apiary club and the school garden. Wrote the school's first beekeeping module.
Fourteen hives across three sites, three harvests a year, a market stall, courses, talks and swarm collection.
Pollinator surveys on the Ljubljana marsh, which is where the meadow hives are now.
Thesis on pollinator diversity in urban gardens.
The 60-hour course, then the mentor year on a colleague's apiary.
Elsewhere
Where else the bees turn up
Contact
Write, or call if it is buzzing
Honey, a course, a talk, a hive on your roof, or a swarm on your washing line.
Got it. I read everything between lessons and reply the same evening.