European Green Belt

We‘re staying here! Conservation pioneers in the Balkans

The bee ambassador

For me, the ultimate beacon of hope is meeting people who want to make a difference, who don‘t give up even though working to build a liveable future can be hard and frustrating. These allies do exist, you just have to find them,” says Sandra Wigger, Project Manager for cultural landscape protection at EuroNatur. We present two of those people.

Shqipe Shala loves what she does. “I am a devoted beekeeper, so there is nothing that cannot be achieved. Even as a child, I was fascinated by bees and I still am today. My husband Liridon and I have invested a lot. We laid the paths to our hives in the mountains ourselves. That took a lot of money, energy and courage. It is why we are virtually the only beekeepers in the Prizren region.”

Shqipe Shala‘s apiary is one of the pilot projects demonstrating a responsible approach to nature that are receiving support from EuroNatur. And while Shqipe can talk confidently about her work today, this was never something she could simply take for granted. It took her a while to establish herself as a businesswoman in the patriarchal environment of rural Kosovo. At first, she was met with suspicion and criticism - and comments along the lines of: what we men couldn‘t do, you certainly can‘t do as a woman.

Shqipe now owns 200 beehives, her apiary Bletaria Etniki supplies the region with honey that is soon to be officially certified organic, and she also cultivates some strawberry fields where the bees find pollen in spring. In fact, Shqipe deserves to have received some form of recognition from the state. After all, she’s helping to counter the increasing rural exodus from Kosovo, and to protect nature. But that‘s far from being the case. Officials gave her a hard time, even put her on their blacklist. She found new hope only when she met Sandra Wigger from EuroNatur.