The B-52s, party band that they are, had some fun music.  Rock Lobster is still one of my favorites.  And the extended remix of Love Shack is, in my opinion, better than the original.  And I would be remiss if I neglected to mention Roam, which has a special significance among my local medieval recreationist friends, because with just a little tweaking you can dance "Road to the Isles" ("Roam to the Isles") to it instead of to the music Scotland the Brave. 

So where was I?  Ah, yes, we had just finished the creme layers in Bled.  A full day, you might say?  But - as the famous saying goes - wait, there's more.

We rode on our replacement bus out of Bled and towards Radovljica, as Manja and her trusty cell phone made some quick calls.  (I found it interesting that, in Slovenia, people answer the phone with "Prosim" - that is, please - rather than a Hello like "Zivio".)  We had been scheduled to tour the Apiculture Museum (C~ebelarski Muzej) in Radovljica, but due to the unforeseen delays in Bled we were late and the Museum was closed.  Fortunately, Manja was able to get the Musuem to open for us (a benefit of a 5-star tour, or just an example of how Slovenes are?  I don't know which is more accurate.)

Bees and beekeeping are enormously important in Slovenia, and not just in history.  As we left Bled, I saw a few fully-functioning beehives, oddly located right along busy streets and close to residential and business areas.  We had already visited one place yesterday with a display of the painted beehive covers, now we were seeing a whole museum dedicated to bees and beekeeping.

We arrived in Radovljica at dusk, and were quickly herded towards the museum building.  We couldn't see much of the town in the waning light, but it was apparent that it was an old city and we were near the city center.  The Museum was on the second floor of a building, and you reaching it by climbing one of a matched set of wide stone stairs.  Very elegant looking.  As we got to the second floor, we could see into parts of the museum through some glass walls.   The guide was there and waiting for us.  After a short introduction, we were allowed to roam freely through the small but very nicely put together museum.  There was an entire room filled with the painted beehive covers (known as Panjska Konc~nica), many from the 1800s.  I think the majority were done by non-professional local people to adorn their own beehives, so they had an authentic rustic quality to them.  I don't mean they were poorly done - most were very well painted!  The covers fell into a few major categories - the most popular appeared to be religious themes (Mary, Jesus, the Holy Infant, saints), folklore, and scenes from daily life (including cautionary themes, like a wife finding her husband drinking and gambling).  The folklore ones were very interesting to me.  One I saw a lot was a woodland scene with animals carrying a prone hunter on a litter.  I wasn't sure if that meant the animals were serving the man, or that it was a reversal and the hunter had become the hunted, and the animals were carrying their trophy.  There was a funny one of men putting old women into a machine, and on the other side out came young women.  Also, there were ones of the devil running a whetstone to sharpen womens' tongues!  But that's just the merest sampling of the variety they had on display.  There were also figural beehives there - in the shape of a mansion, a bear, a person, etc. 

Naturally, the museum also had a live beehive there.  It was against one of the outside walls, and a tunnel allowed the bees to leave and come back.  We watched for a while as the bees went about their business.  I tried to find the queen (usually marked with a dot of paint) but we were running out of time.  Before we left, I bought a few things at the museum's gift shop - an intricate molded beeswax heart-shaped ornament and a bottle of honey liquor.

Our next and final stop of the evening was just down the street from the museum - a restaurant with a Gingerbread museum and shop in the basement!  It was a very natural transition to move from the honey museum to a ginegerbread bakery.  While it wasn't a full-scale museum per se, you could see people working on making the gingerbread, along with the cutters and little paper designs that they put on the finished cookies.  Slovenian gingerbread cookies are not what we think of as gingerbread.  These cookies are given as love tokens and keepsakes as much as they are eaten, I think.  Most are heart shaped and the tops are covered in a deep red glaze, then layers of colored and white icing in detailed patterns and often with pieces of paper held in place by the icing.  As the icing dries, it hardens - and these cookies are durable!  I have one at home that I was given years ago - it is shaped like a narrow oval with a knob at the top, and a Victorian-style vintage looking child's face was on the knob, so the whole thing had the effect of a baby in swaddling clothes with only their face was visible, the red icing the blanket and the icing the decoration on the blanket.