Honey bees are our nature park ambassadors

Looking after the busy bees

Bees are vital for our forest because they are excellent pollinators and make an invaluable contribution to biodiversity.

The philosophy of our nature park and our beekeeper is very simple: we want to bring people as close as possible to honey bees and their products. This is how we propagate the knowledge of how all of our visitors can easily make a contribution to maintaining a healthy environment.

Bees as nature park ambassadors

Since 2015, our visitors can observe our honey bees next to a platform along the salamander trail. On certain dates our beekeeper "Bieno" Benno Karner offers to look over his shoulder to observe his work with busy bees. You can also become a sponsor of one of our beehives, then get your own honey. Our beekeeper will be happy to inform you on his website www.bieno.at.

In addition to our existing beehives on the "Above View" platform, since summer 2019 we have built more beehives and an observation area on the restored Schöffelstein meadow, and since 2021 we have launched the "Humming Nature Park" project at the Nature Park Center.

The life of a bee

A bee colony (with about 40,000 to 60,000 bees) lives in a hive, which is usually a wooden box. In the hive hang the honeycombs, which the queen needs to lay her eggs and which the bees use to store honey. A honeybee takes 21 days to hatch and it dies after only about 40 days of life. On a good "harvest day" (a day on which there is a good supply of nectar, pollen and honeydew), a collecting bee will fly out of its hive up to 30 times. During one flight it visits about 200 to 300 plants and pollinates 6,000 to 9,000 flowers. For 1 kg of honey, about 150,000 trips from the hive with about 150,000 "flight kilometers" are necessary.

Since 2016, the honey produced and harvested in our nature park carries the official "Nature Park Specialty" quality label. You can buy it from beekeeper Bieno or in the nature park office.

More information about other "Nature Park Specialty" products is available from the Association of Nature Parks of Austria (VNÖ).

Note: There are other locations of our bees on the Schöffelsteinwiese and on the Feihlerhöhe.

Our nature park honey has the Austrian Nature Park quality mark "Naturparkspezialität".

You have the opportunity to purchase honey from our bees in the park office during opening hours: a 250 g jar costs € 6.50, a 500 g jar costs € 9.50. We are happy to take empty jars back.