You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. Beekeeping. It's a word that evokes images of rural perfection. The beekeeper and older man,

hatted and veiled, wafting smoke around, like incense, against a backdrop of green.

But that's not quite the way it is anymore.

As you're here in this program, the backdrop is changing.

Beekeepers are getting younger and women are getting involved.

It's a cheerful story about honey and bees and there haven't been many of those over the last few years. We've had, still have colony collapse disorder.

Over 30% of USBBs disappeared in 2012.

And then there's the controversy about neonicotinoid pesticides,

plus scandals about some honey imports that are definitely not what it says on the label.

It's a bleak picture about the insects that pollinate a third of our food supply.

But that isn't the way it is in the new world of urban beekeeping.

As the globe's got more built up, something's been driving urbanites all over the world

to bring into their built-up lives a relationship that's been important to the human race

for millennia, a relationship that's got people fired up.

...