Bee Day

Where it came from

The day was Slovenia's idea. The Slovenian Beekeepers' Association lobbied at the UN for three years; on 20 December 2017 the General Assembly adopted resolution A/RES/72/211, naming 20 May as the annual observance, with the FAO holding the secretariat. The first Bee Day followed on 20 May 2018. The date was chosen because Anton Janša — beekeeper, farm boy from the Kranj region of present-day Slovenia, eventually the first permanent teacher of apiculture at Empress Maria Theresa's School of Beekeeping in Vienna — was born on 20 May 1734. Janša died at 39, but left a German-language textbook on bee husbandry that was published posthumously in 1775 and the Slovenian beekeeping tradition that today gives the country its half-joking national label: Land of the Good Beekeepers.

What's new in 2026

The FAO theme this year is "Bee Together for People and the Planet — A partnership that sustains us all," and unusually for a one-day observance, it sits inside a much larger 2026 frame. The UN has designated 2026 as both the International Year of Rangeland and Pastoralists and the International Year of the Woman Farmer, and the FAO is treating all three threads as one programme: pastures, women, pollinators. The flagship event is in Geneva on 27 May at the Palais des Nations, 11:30–13:00, co-hosted by FAO with the permanent missions of Slovenia, Switzerland, Ethiopia and Mexico to the UN in Geneva, plus the Geneva Environment Network. Local beekeepers run demonstrations; the programme closes with a honey tasting. This is the ninth observance since 2018.

Five things worth knowing

1. About 75% of the world's leading food crops depend on animal pollination to some degree, with bees doing the bulk of the work. Coffee, almonds, apples, blueberries, squash, courgette and most melons all lean on pollinators.
2. A honeybee visits 50 to 100 flowers per foraging trip and may fly up to six miles from the hive. Across her entire six-week summer life, a single worker produces roughly one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.
3. Slovenia takes beekeeping seriously enough that roughly one Slovenian in two hundred is a registered beekeeper, and hives sit on the roofs of public buildings in Ljubljana. The wooden hive-front paintings — panjske končnice — are protected as cultural heritage.
4. A 2020 study published in Science tracked 67 bumblebee species across 110 years and found their habitable range had contracted by close to 300 kilometres at the southern edge in both North America and Europe — climate warming, not pesticides, produced the clearest signal.
5. The earliest detailed evidence of beekeeping comes from carved reliefs at the sun temple of King Niuserre at Abu Ghurab in Egypt, dated to around 2400 BCE, which show beekeepers smoking hives and decanting honey into jars. The practice is at least 4,500 years old.

What to gift

• A jar of raw single-origin honey from a named regional beekeeper — chestnut, buckwheat, heather, acacia — not a supermarket blend. The taste comparison alone makes the gift.
• A native wildflower seed mix matched to the climate of the person receiving it. An early-spring pollinator strip outperforms most scented candles by every measure that matters.
• A bee hotel or solitary-bee nest box, mounted south-facing. Around 90% of bee species are solitary rather than hive-based, and they need shelter rather than honey supers.
• A beekeeping experience day at a local apiary — half a morning in a veil, lifting a frame, learning the smell of a healthy hive.
• A good book: Honey from a Weed by Patience Gray for the cooks, or The Bees by Laline Paull for the readers of fiction who'd rather think sideways.
• A hive sponsorship or donation in the recipient's name to The Bee Conservancy, Buglife, or the Slovenian Beekeepers' Association.