I pushed back when someone last year suggested bees. All I could imagine was a swarm on my back after some pheromone-triggering rookie slip-up. Invaluable pollinators whose decline is a catastrophe, I get that they are key to regeneration. But, well, maybe later.

But then a dear friend in America, who once kept a hive or two, surprise-landed the whole shebang for Christmas: cedar wood National, smoker, hive tool, a white suit with a fencer’s mask, a copy of Bee­keeping for Dummies and the promise of a colony in the spring and a few hours’ instruction.