The Guardian

Beekeeping is growing in popularity in cities, perhaps, because city produced honey can be of exceptional quality. The reason is simple: bees make honey from the nectar of flowers, processing it within themselves before storing it in honeycomb. And in cities, bees eat good stuff. There’s a superb range of flowers on which to forage, thanks to trees, parks, wasteland

and the efforts of gardeners, a more varied diet, no doubt, compared to the monoculturally farmed countryside where the choice of forage may mean little more than flowering oilseed rape. All of which means interesting, excellent honey. But as an urban beekeeper-to-be, what was bothering the author of this article (apart from the prospect of stings) was how beekeeping could coexist with crowded city life. Quite happily, it seems, according to Julian Lush, secretary of the London Beekeepers Association, who says that “nobody should be discouraged from keeping bees in an urban garden.” Lush’s own good-sized garden has three hives, meaning that in high season there could be 1,50,000 bees close by. However, on my visit there was little evidence of thousands of stinging creatures around: most of the time, honeybees are discreet and go about their serious business of managing the colony and seeking food and water without bothering anyone. Apart from gardens, other good urban sites are parks, where I’m told much urban beekeeping goes on away from the public gaze, and even rooftops.

Harvesting your own honey, of course, is one of the main reasons for today’s upsurge in interest in beekeeping. “There is definitely more interest,” says John Chapple, LBKA chairman and seasoned beekeeper, “in particular among younger people and especially among women. When I ask why, they say it’s to do with being more ‘green’, being more involved with nature and eating healthier food.” The medicinal properties of honey have been known for millennia - it has antibacterial and antimicrobial qualities - these are often lost in commercial honey production. With your first bees you become, in effect, the manager of a large wildlife colony, responsible for ensuring its welfare from year to year. Making this task trickier is the fact that colonies do not stand still. As my beekeeping course emphasised, honeybee colonies are

“superorganisms” and their aim is to reproduce. This has disadvantages for the beekeeper, who loses half a colony when pre-reproduction migration happens, and for the beekeeper’s neighbours, who are unlikely to know that bees are at their most benign when clumped together in a terrifying looking swarm. Kit basics include a hive and hive tool, a smoker, some overalls, gloves and a veil. Then there are the bees, which can be acquired for free in a swarm via local beekeepers, or purchased from specialist suppliers. Buying bees from a trusted source is, I’m told, recommended, because they can be guaranteed disease-free and docile, ideal for the first-time beekeeper and their nervous neighbours.

Fast fact

It is estimated that there are 5,000 beehives in London alone, meaning that at the height of summer, honeybees outnumber humans in the capital by 30 to 1.