I'm decked out like an astronaut in top-to-toe white overalls with elbow-length gloves, boots and a veiled hood. “That should keep you bee-free,” says Avril Burt as I nervously follow her to the bottom of her South Wonston garden where she keeps two hives, each home to about 6,000 honeybees.

It’s raining and bees don’t like to forage when it’s wet. So just a few hum about the hives as she lifts the lids to reveal the busy worker bees inside and their precious stores of honey.

Avril is known locally as “the honey lady.”

When I arrive at her bungalow, she is sticking labels on her jars of Dever Down Honey. People knock on her front door to buy the honey and she also sells it to the village shop and a deli in Overton. The 77-yearold former research scientist and teacher is one of a growing band of Hampshire people who keep bees.

A trained botanist, she keeps the bees to fertilise her fruit trees and soft fruit. The honey is a bonus, she says.

Her 80ft by 40ft back garden has 17 fruit trees, including apples, pears, plum, cherry and damson.

In addition, she grows raspberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, gooseberries, blackberries and strawberries as well as vegetables such as potatoes, beans and carrots. The garden, strictly organic, produces enough soft fruit to feed Avril and her husband, Len, all year round.

There are also 20 butts to harvest rain water.

All she needs is a few chickens and goats and it could be a scene from TV’s The Good Life.

“I just like growing things,” says Avril, as she perches on a stool in her kitchen ready to bottle more honey.

“My husband makes the labels. He can’t deal with the bees. They go for him. Bees can tell if people are nervous.”

The breakfast bar is crammed with jars of honey, two bell-jars of mead and several large bowls of elderflower cordial that she is also making.

“People think it’s just a matter of taking the honey from the hive, but it is a lot more work than that,” she said.

She shows me how the beeswax is scraped from the combs before they are put into a large, white plastic bin for the rest to be spun out in a centrifuge.

Hers is hand-operated: “I have an electric one but it is such a trouble to set up and I don’t really have the space,” she explains.

The liquid honey is filtered and left for at least 24 hours before it is bottled: “The minimum time from hive to jar is probably 36 hours.”

However, the honey doesn’t always flow.

In 26 years of beekeeping, she says she has never known a honey harvest as bad as 2008.

A miserable summer that confined the bees to their hives, followed by a winter plagued with deadly viruses, meant that she only produced 15lb of honey last year, barely a tenth of her usual level.

But this year looks more promising: “I have collected 30lb of honey already. The weather has been better. We need hot, dry weather in the middle of the day for the flowers to produce nectar.”

Avril has the hives near her greenhouse so she can observe her bees at work.

She said: “It is fascinating. I can tell when the queen bee is happy and laying eggs because the bees return to the hive with yellow sacs of pollen on their legs like plus fours.”

Avril first kept bees when she lived in south London.

Surprisingly, the litter-strewn suburban streets yielded more honey than the rolling fields of Hampshire.

City gardens offer a wider variety of flowers all year round than is now found in the countryside.

She said: “When I was in London, I would get between 120 and 125lb of honey per hive on a fairly regular basis. Down here, I usually get 50 to 60lbs.

“In the country, you may get a big crop of rape but then it is finished and there is little to feed the bees.

So monoculture is no good for bees.”

Pesticides on farmers’ fields is another reason why city bees are healthier and more productive than their country cousins.

Avril said: “The problem with pesticides is that if they don’t kill off insects immediately, they are regarded as safe, but there is a some evidence that certain insecticides build up in bees. It is the build-up that kills them.

“It may also have the effect of reducing their immunity to viruses and a poorly colony won’t be able to resist the varroa mite, which is the major pest at the moment.”

Up to a third of Britain’s 240,000 hives failed to survive last winter due to disease and poor weather.

Avril said: “I went into the winter with two strong hives and came out with one weak colony.”

Beekeepers also face worried neighbours and the threat of vandalism. One neighbour complained that Avril’s bees were making a “beeline” for his outdoor jacuzzi. “The bees were drinking the water because it was warm,” explained Mrs Burt, who is a member of Winchester District Beekeepers’ Association.

Last year, she took one hive to a field near Three Maids Hill after it “went rogue” to keep it out of people’s way.

But the hive was vandalised and the bees, which had calmed down, all died.

She has since acquired a replacement hive with a swarm of “beautiful” bees that had been living in a chimney in Alresford.

Bees have different temperaments, explained Avril.

Italian bees are laid-back and less likely to sting while the traditional English black bee are more aggressive.

Bees are crucial to pollination, so keeping bees, even on a small scale, can help plants flourish.

Farmers sometimes ask beekeepers to move their hives onto their fields to fertilise their crops.

“Bees give back as much as they collect,” said Avril.

“Without pollination, we would not have any crops such as apples or pears.

“Beekeepers are helping the cycle of life.”

Locally-produced honey tastes nothing like bland supermarket honey that has been blended, heated and finely filtered.

The taste of local honey will vary with the season and what is available for the bees to eat. It’s not only the taste of local honey that some people like. Many claim it offers medicinal benefits, too.

“It is true to an extent in that there is pollen in the honey,” said Avril. “Hayfever sufferers can develop an immunity. I am not saying that always happens, but that is the general belief.

“You don’t get that in the very finely filtered supermarket honey because almost all of the advantages of pollen have been lost.”

I can’t leave without having a taste. I dip my finger into the pale liquid. It is incredibly sweet. “Floral,”

says Avril, adding: “In the spring, I get honey in which I can sometimes smell the apple blossom.”