In the territory of Slovenia we have been cultivating the autochthonous breed of honey bees, Apis mellifera carnica, for centuries. It is one of the world’s best-known and expanded breeds of bees. We call it »Kranjska sivka«, it is also known as Carniolan Bee, Carnica Biene, Krainer Biene. In the Beekeeping Pislak Bali we’ve been breeding the Apis mellifera carnica intensively since the seventies of the last century and until now, we are proud of more than 450,00 reared queens.

Selection is carried out on 2600 bee families, which enables us to have a large quantity of first-class breeding material.

In order to ensure top-quality breeding stock, we first select queens with the best economic results on the basis of ongoing observation of the selection criteria listed above. Secondly, the colonies with the best morphological characteristics are selected among the colonies from the first selection.

We are focused on the largeness of the breaded queen bee because it has been established that larger queen bees have 170 ovarian tubules in one ovary and produce on average 27.6 kg honey, while smaller queen bees with 109 ovarian tubules in one ovary produce on average 19.2 kg honey.

We also pay a lot of attention to creating of the drone breeding lines.

The breeding of our queen bees is under constant supervision of the Agricultural Institute of Slovenia. We also cooperate with the institutes in Germany and the Czech Republic. We regularly measure the cubital index on queen bees and perform PIN testing (testing their cleaning capabilities) and testing through their offspring (offspring testing of queen bees).

We use several types of mating hives of different sizes and can adapt to the wishes of the customer. The most important among of them is Pislak’s mating hive, designed by Janko Pislak specifically for Apis Mellifera Carnica, which has proved to be extremely successful.

The orders that we get from around the world are a reflection of the quality of our queen bees. We mostly get orders from numerous European countries, Middle East and Far East.

We are proud of many awards and prizes that encourage us to keep on working for better and better quality of our bee queens.

The purchase of the queens takes place through pre-orders.  By agreement, we can put the queens into our cage or the cage that you provide. We also can send larger quantities by plane.

All bee queens are fertilized and labeled with a number.  They meet all selection criteria. We pick up the bee queen only when we notice closed brood in the mating hive. If this doesn’t happen, the queen is eliminated.

Upon the request of the buyer, we can issue an extract from the herd book for Carnica queens. We do our best to pick up the queens the shortest possible period before selling them, and thus ensure less stress for the queen.