You can see why bankers would like bees. Baroness Burdett-Coutts, of the great banking family, became the first president of the British Beekeeping Association in 1874, while Robin Leigh-Pemberton, a former governor of the Bank Of England, kept hives on the roof of a building in London. The appeal must lie in all that industry and, of course, the golden reward.

It is less easy to conceive of bee­keeping as an urban endeavour; one imagines the creatures buzzing from clearing to copse in a more bucolic setting. But, thanks to the increasingly monocultural cultivation of the countryside, more and more flowers are holding out in the city. And bees have become the pollinating saviours of a botanical diversity paradoxically enduring on railway embankments and in urban backyards.