Amateur beekeeping has become a popular hobby.
People of all walks of life are swelling the membership numbers of The Amateur Beekeepers' Association in all its branches.
From working people to the former Governor of NSW, beekeeping is a fascination.
In the past men of the cloth, the clergy, made major contributions to beekeeping, most notably Rev Lorenzo Langstroth, a parson in Philadelphia who designed the hive which is still the standard used today.
Members of the medical profession, doctors and nurses, are there in numbers.
Who else better to promote honey as a food and a topical antiseptic?
The contribution of one German doctor to knowledge of the biology and sociology of bees is outstanding.
Dr Karl von Frisch lived and worked in Europe's most troubled times, 1886-1982.
He was trained as a surgeon by one of Germany's most famous and served in that capacity in the German Army in both World Wars.
His early studies on colour perception, initially in fish, led him to focusing on insects and eventually to bees which dominated his attention for the rest of his life.
With typical German attention to detail and seemingly unlimited patience, he showed that bees are influenced by the colour of flowers as well as smell.
It was he who found that they are most attracted to blues and purples and have little perception of red at the other end of the spectrum.
While conducting these experiments, an observation familiar to all beekeepers took his attention - a single bee on a sugary bait station returned to the hive and within a very short time many more bees found it.
He repeated the experiment by marking the scouting bee (he was very good at marking, later using multiple colours on one bee), and capturing her as she re-emerged from the hive.
But the other bees still flew unerringly to the bait.
Clearly, the scout had not led the other bees to the sugar source and must have 'told' them about it.
With a glass-paned observation hive, he observed the dances which constitute bee language.
It puzzles me how he saw all that he did because the transparent sides of the hive would expose only the outside frames and most of the bees' activity is nearer the centre of the colony.
Nevertheless he did, not only observing the dances but interpreting them.
He learned their language, how the scout tells recruits the direction, distance and quality of a new food source.
He even identified slight differences in the dance routines of different races of bees concluding that bees have dialects or accents!
He went much further, studying flight paths, often trying to trick bees by putting obstacles in their way, measuring distances and light perception.
He harnessed the technology of his day, using movie films in the 1920s and 1930s to study the life cycle of bees.
He had a harsh perception of drones, describing them as 'glutinous, fat, lazy and stupid'.
He was never a Nazi - his time served during World War II was forced upon him.
In fact, his life was in jeopardy because of a faint Jewish ancestry, but he was saved by his research into bees and their contribution to the productivity of food crops.