Raw honey from four meadows above Radovljica

Light, keptin wax.

Capped honeycomb glowing amber, lit from behind

Why every lid names a meadow

Honey tastes of where the bees went, so every jar tells you where that was.

Mojca keeps 180 hives on the Jelovica plateau, the Pokljuka heath and two valley meadows. Tine spins each flow on its own, cold, the week it is capped, and writes the meadow, the height and the month on the lid.

Meadows
4, from 420 to 1,250 m
Flows a year
May to September
Heated above
Never past 38 °C

The season

A year in four flows

A hand holding a glowing jar of honey up against a dusk sky
May

Acacia, in the Sava valley

The first flow, from the black locust trees along the river at 420 m. Pale as white wine and slow to set — it stays runny for a year or more.

June

Lime blossom on Jelovica

Ten days when the old lindens on the plateau hum from dawn. Mint and lime peel, a cool finish, and the jar we open first every summer.

July

Sweet chestnut, by the woods

Dark, tannic and faintly bitter, from the chestnut groves on the valley edge. We wait until it loses its green note before we lift a frame.

August

Silver fir honeydew, at 1,130 m

Not from flowers at all: the bees gather the sweet dew of the fir forest. Resinous, malty and nearly black, it comes in good years only.

Three pieces of comb dripping honey against a warm brown ground

Runny, set or comb

Choose how it sits on the spoon

  1. RunnyPours in a ribbon. Lime, acacia, chestnut, fir and buckwheat.
  2. SetFine crystals, spreads like soft butter. Meadow and heather.
  3. CombCut from the frame, wax and all. Chew it, then spread the rest.
Open the texture finder
“I taste every frame before it is spun. If the chestnut still tastes green, we leave it on the hive another week.”
Mojca ZupanKeeps the bees, since 1998
A honeybee flying toward a sage stem in low golden light