Bees matter to us a great deal, and not only because of honey. Most important of all is pollination: a third of all the food we eat depends on it. Yet climate change, disease, intensive farming and pesticides are putting bees under growing pressure. Beekeepers protect their bees as best they can, but wild bees are far more exposed. There are more than 500 species of wild bee, and they...

A traditional Slovenian breakfast is bread with butter and honey. We also stir honey into tea, reach for it when we have a cold and use it to sweeten all kinds of baking. It has become so ordinary that we no longer stop to ask where it comes from. We rarely realise that a single bee works its whole life to make 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey. To fill...