‘If you can re-engage your fascination with nature it will never stop teaching you things’

back towards childhood,” he says. “I’ve realised that sometimes just sitting and staring at something outside is very therapeutic.

“It allows you time to discover new things, and nurse that sense of wonder. I’m much calmer and I’m much less certain about things. “But I’m much more relaxed about being less certain.” Now Roger has written a beguiling account about the lessons he has learned from the hives he attempts to gently nurture.

“My book is part of a wider library of natural history writing, which is saying to people, ‘Look after them while you’ve got them’,” he says.

“The last estimate was that if we didn’t have the bees pollinating for us in the UK it would cost £900million to do it ourselves, but we can’t because we don’t have the kit.” It’s the way bees fit into world ecology that Roger finds so extraordinary, and so moving.

“The way it’s made me connect bits of nature that I hadn’t previously connected is one of the biggest changes in me,” he says.

“You look at a single bee on a dandelion and that bee is doing maybe 12 to 14 flights a day, visiting maybe 40 to 50 plants to produce one twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in the duration of a worker bee’s life. “There might be 50,000 of these foragers in a hive, and there are 250,000 hives in the UK.

“There are 240 species of bee 27,000 species of insect in the UK.

“Take all that into consideration and you suddenly realise this invisible interdependence that we all have: these trillions of lines of nature connecting.

“It thrills me because I’m a child at heart learning about things I don’t understand, but it frightens me because of the way we’ve been treating it. If you go to East Anglia and into those huge mono-cultural beet fields, there are just two types of bird, a paucity of insects, and no bees.”

Aand

ND HIS scorn for those putting down plastic grass is immense: “What are you thinking about?” Perhaps the biggest lesson from his experiments with what he calls “liquid gold” is the knowledge of nature that can come through working with the cycle of the seasons.This has given him a new-found respect for the honeybee and the threats it faces.

“If you can re-engage your fascination and awe with nature it will never stop teaching you things,” he adds. “The biggest joy has been connecting with what is going on out there.”

●●Liquid Gold: Bees and the Pursuit of Midlife Honey by Roger Morgan-Grenville (Icon Books, £12.99) is out now. For free UK delivery, call Express Bookshop on 01872 562310 or order via expressbookshop.co.uk