THERE is a new buzz in town. Beekeeping, once the preserve of country folk, has become the fashionable hobby for young professionals in search of the good life, writes Maurice Chittenden.

Some of the best honey now comes from colonies next to Newcastle city centre and hives yards from Downing Street.

Urban beekeepers have begun to outnumber their rural rivals because plants growing in towns can offer more exciting nectars than single-crop agriculture and pesticide-laden fields in the countryside.

The British Beekeepers Association’s membership has almost doubled to 10,500 in the past three years in the biggest upsurge since the peak in the 1980s before a parasitic mite killed off millions of bees.

Chic shops sell Primrose Hill and Wimbledon honey from London and Alderley Edge honey from Cheshire’s millionaire footballer belt. English VIP Wildflower Honey boasts it is “gathered from thousands of wildflowers in and around the Hampstead Heath area” of north London.

Zac Goldsmith, editor of The Ecologist, is a new convert, producing “golden, runny” honey from his hives in Devon, while clusters of worker bees in London now outnumber the capital’s human workforce.

Bill Turnbull, the BBC Breakfast News presenter, has become such an expert that he gives talks and ran last year’s London marathon in a beekeeper’s suit. Turnbull, who has 10 hives and produces Bill T’s Honey in Buckinghamshire, said: “Homemade honey is an entirely different product to the mass-produced stuff. Depending what time of year it is, you get to taste the flavours of whatever the bees are feeding on.”

Young people are now queueing to join beekeeping courses and to buy hives at £100 a time. Some keep them on roof terraces and patios. In London, hives have appeared on the roof of the Bank of England and on top of Fortnum & Mason, the Queen’s grocers, in Piccadilly.

Dorian Pritchard, a medical geneticist who lectures on beekeeping, said: “Most of those who join the course are young people. It’s a rebellion against the lifestyle of the office worker. They want to get out and build drystone walls, heave heavy things or keep bees.

“One chap who keeps bees says he can’t eat the honey because he is diabetic but he does it because he needs some danger in his life.”

Not that beekeeping is strenuous. Most experts say hives need to be checked only once every seven to 10 days when the bees are at their most active between April and July.

Kathryn Webb, 30, a mother of two, who has just started keeping 60,000 bees in a hive a few minutes’ walk from the centre of Newcastle, has already been stung on the knee.

“It didn’t hurt as much as I expected,” she said. “Bees are not threatening in the same way that wasps are. They are nice little beasties with complex social structures. They are also good for gardeners. The plants they harvest their nectar from go into seed quicker than others.”

James Hamill, who owns the Hive Honey shop in Clapham, south London, has 200 bookings for his beekeeping courses this summer with three-quarters from people who live in urban areas. “We are getting a wide range of people including investment bankers and lawyers,” he said. “More and more people are thinking they can do it in their back garden on top of their busy job.”

Michael Badger, a quantity surveyor and former president of the beekeepers’ association, limits the number of bees he keeps at home in Leeds to 100,000 because their humming “frightens the neighbours”.

“It used to be clergymen and railway level-crossing keepers that kept bees,” he said. “Now it’s mainly thirtysomething professional types who are taking it up. They see it as a wholesome activity.”

Warmer temperatures in towns keep bees active longer. An urban hive produces about 60lb of honey a year, twice as much as in rural areas. Much is given away to neighbours.

“A pot of honey makes a nice sweetener,” said John Chapple, a former British Airways engineer who keeps hives in St James’s Park, a bee’s flight from No 10 Downing Street. “But I have not yet been tempted to deliver one to the Blairs.”

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