If you are driving around the countryside of Slovenia today, you will see apiaries springing up in the blooming meadows. With their colourful, painted beehives, they not only decorate the landscape, but indicate where you can buy local honey.
Bees are big in Slovenia; globally, it has the highest concentration of beekeepers per capita, and is the only country in the EU to have granted state protection to its native bee (the Carniolan grey, prized for its docility, adaptability and productivity). As such, these apiaries can be found in almost every village. Historically, they were built by untrained craftsmen who inherited their knowledge from ancestors, refining it with their own experiences and creativity. Although designs vary depending on region, the most common one is made of wood with a gable roof, the hives stacked so their front sides are visible. Often, these front panels are painted with religious scenes or folk tales, transforming the apiaries into open-air galleries.
Painted beehive panels, or poslikane panjske končnice in Slovenian, are said to have first appeared in the 18th century in Carniola, which was then part of the Austrian empire. Later, they cropped up in Carinthia and northwest Styria, both part of the nation today. According to Kristina Seljak, curator of the Museum of Apiculture in Radovljica, home to the largest collection of painted beehive panels in Slovenia (some 900 examples), they developed in those areas due to the use of kranjič hives. ‘The front planks of these were ideal for forming a kind of wall or mosaic due to their stacking structure,’ she explains. While in other regions, beekeepers used basket hives made of straw or branches, the simple, elongated boards of the kranjič hives could be decorated more straightforwardly.
Thanks to the presence of several notable figures, beekeeping in Carniola and Carinthia developed faster than in other regions. Among them was Anton Janša, considered the father of the modern discipline, whose supposed birthday has been celebrated as International Bee Day since 2017, when Slovenia successfully lobbied the UN. Beekeepers in those areas could therefore afford higher-quality and more durable painted panels, more often than not executed by late or post-Baroque craftsmen/artists, who otherwise created religious works for filial churches. Panels might also be decorated by the beekeepers themselves, or semi-qualified peasant painters, who also produced work on furniture or the façades of rural homes.
‘Artists made their own paints by grinding natural pigments and mixing them with egg white or oil, often linseed oil. One of the first symbols painted on beehive panels was the morina taca or trutamora,’ Seljak says, referring to a circular symbol also commonly painted on to furniture or door frames to protect inhabitants from evil spirits. Some researchers believe poslikane panjske končnice developed precisely for this reason: to protect and to ward off misfortune.
That’s why religious motifs are older in origin than everyday scenes. The oldest-known painted beehive panel, for example, bears the year 1758 and depicts the Virgin Mary and Jesus. In addition to pious imagery, panels created throughout the 18th and 19th centuries feature caricatures, folk tales, carnival figures, hunting scenes and current events. Among the panels at the aforementioned Museum of Apiculture, for example, is one depicting a brutal triple murder which occurred in Luče in 1884. In a time before the internet, the painted panels helped disseminate information to a mostly illiterate public. Inevitably, they also reflected the social mores of that period; women were often demeaned, ridiculed or depicted as sinners (in one example, a woman’s tongue is rolled through a whetstone – a reminder to keep caustic comments at bay).
Beekeeping continues to flourish in Slovenia and is increasingly on the rise in cities. But in the 20th century, the custom of painting hives began to decline. Today, it appears on Unesco’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Those who maintain the tradition tend to use acrylic paints or prints, reviving or reinterpreting old motifs, or creating new ones altogether. Bojana Rogelj Škafar, curator for folk-art collections at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, points to the 2022 initiative Queering Beehives. ‘The motifs of painted-beehive panels had disturbed a group of young people, who reinterpreted them in a queer context,’ she explains. Launched as part of Ljubljana’s annual City of Women festival, the goal of the project was to inscribe the experiences and perspectives of LGBTQ+ people into the history of poslikane panjske končnice, as in one example, which reimagined the image of a giant snail chasing a tailor. A recurring design in the narobe svet (‘topsy-turvy world’) genre, this was a tongue-in-cheek comment on the stereotypical slowness of tailors, while also satirising the perceived effeminacy of that profession. In their reinterpretation, one of the project’s participants depicts a rainbow-coloured mollusc chasing a couple off-panel. The artwork’s name? Gay_snail.
Learn more about painted beehives at the Museum of Apiculture, Radovljica. Visit mro.si/en/musem-of-apiculture.
Slovene Ethnographic Museum. Visit etno-muzej.si/en
A version of this article appears in the July 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
