Stories from the Bees: Beehive Painting in Slovenia

Driving through the endless green forests of Slovenia you might not notice that here bees also tell stories. Well at least they used to through beehive paintings.

From the 18^th century on (and even before that) people in Slovenia admired the ability of bees to produce something as magical as honey that they started to build them huge houses. But not just any houses, you could say they were almost temples.

If you live in multi-unit building, you know that in order to find your apartment you must remember the floor and number of your apartment if you ever want to find it in that huge building. Otherwise you would just stumble in another apartment. Just imagine what a huge mess that would be! Bees are very similar to us in that sense. They also have close loving families and of course each family needs a home where it can thrive. But what happens when you put a large number of bee homes into one huge building? How are they ever going to find their own apartment?

Well, Slovenians had an interesting approach to solving that problem. Bees can’t read numbers as we can, so why not paint their apartments with colors? So if your home would be pink, it should be pretty easy to recognize it among all others. But Slovenians are quite complicated people, always trying to impress neighbors and do better than them. As a result, the beehive paintings just got out of their hands: “My neighbor has pink, green and blue bee homes, so I’ll just make a super nice oil painting with a story on mine. Ha, try to beat that, neighbor!”

This competition got so crazy, that soon every beehive had impressive oil paintings picturing religious motifs, stories from local history, myths, books and everyday life – it was especially popular to make fun of certain professions or of that neighbor’s wife that you really didn’t like because she talked too much. And yes, you can even find Princess Pocahontas saving James Smith’s life.

Sadly, the tradition of painting beehive front panels disappeared in the 20^th century, but you can still find many today in the museums or if you are lucky on your drive through the country – there is a really old replica still standing in Breznica (Janša’s Beehive).

The devil is sanding woman’s tongue to make it sharper – there had to be a woman in the village that talked too much.

Adam and Eve are expelled from paradise.

King Matjaž – A Slovenian myth about a mighty sleeping king that will wake up when the time is right and his beard will grow long enough and will bring justice and freedom to people.