The paper aims to examine the impact of different beekeepers’ characteristics on their perceptions of two personal competencies required for successful participation in short food supply chains (abbr. SFSCs): (1) Communication and marketing knowledge and skills, and (2) Available time to cultivate communication with customers and sell honey. Data was collected using survey research, and the total sample included 1,081 beekeepers in the region of the Western Balkans. Multinomial logistic regression was used for data processing. According to the Nagelkerke R2 the model explained a high percentage of the variance of both analyzed dependent variables. The results indicate that beekeepers perceive both competencies as strong to medium strong. The first competency is more likely to be evaluated as strong to very strong by young beekeepers and those who perceive distance to consumers as a small or no barrier to honey sale. The strongest predictor for the second competency is family labour. The value Exp(B) shows that beekeepers with abundant family labour are 19.1 times more likely to perceive available time as a strong to very strong competency in direct sales.
