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"If you smoke the colony one or two minutes before opening the hive, the bees gorge themselves on honey in preparation for abandoning the nest," he explains. "When they're full, they're more placid and far less liable to sting."

For Craig - who started tending hives on his parents' farm when he was 13 - beekeeping is a labour of love. Without enthusiasts like him, he reckons, the British honey bee would no longer exist. The government's recent pledge of £10million towards research into Britain's dwindling bee population (as well as falling numbers of butterflies and other pollinators) has been broadly welcomed by people like Craig. Officially, British bee numbers have fallen by 15% in the past year, although some claim the figure is closer to 30%. The losses are part of a trend that is gathering pace. The phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) - whereby entire colonies simply vanish from their hives - has been accredited with wiping out a third of bee colonies in the US and South America since 2006, although scientists have yet to pinpoint a single cause. Many beekeepers argue that several factors, some natural, others man-made, are to blame.

In the UK, and abroad, the varroa mite is wreaking havoc on bee populations. The parasitic mite pokes tiny holes in the bodies of its host, making the bees more susceptible to deadly viruses. In recent years, the mite has become resistant to the once-effective compound treatment fluvalinate, and scientists are now scrabbling for a viable alternative. "If bees become infested with varroa the colony will die out in about four years," says Craig. "At the moment, you would lose about 99% of your stock." The mite is unlikely to be eradicated, he says. The trick is to keep its numbers under control.

Examining a plastic tray from one of his hives, he points to the tiny red carcasses of varroa, counting them carefully as he goes. Like other beekeepers, Craig faces a Catch-22 scenario. Were he to treat his bees chemically now, he would be unable to sell this summer's crop of honey. "There's not very many of them," he says, replacing the plastic tray. "These bees should be OK until August."

Although unexplained bee deaths do occur in the UK - Craig knows one Scottish beekeeper who lost 200 of his 220 colonies last winter - he thinks there are probable, if unproven, culprits. One of those is the widespread use of systemic industrial pesticides in agriculture. "There are some terrible pesticides being used at the moment," he says. "Individually they may be safe to use, but it's the cocktails, the way they are being mixed together, that causes the problem. Those mixes have not been tested and could be lethal."

He recalls his childhood in the 1950s, when "the butterflies were in their hundreds" and insects "all had their territory" - before the proliferation of single-crop farming and intensive agricultural techniques. Attempts by beekeepers in France to prevent the use of the systemic pesticide Imidacloprid resulted in its ban as a sunflower seed treatment in 1999, but failed to halt the bees' demise. Last year, an estimated 30% of Europe's 13.6 million hives died, according to the International Federation Of Beekeepers' Associations, Apimondia. Some regions of Germany saw a staggering 80% drop in bee colony numbers in 2008 following the introduction of the pesticide clothianidin, although a link between the chemical and the deaths was never proven.

Alan Teale is a former professor of molecular genetics at Stirling University and now heads the Scottish Beekeepers Association. With three or four colonies in rural Perthshire, he is a "small-scale amateur" in beekeeping terms, as are the majority of the association's 1200 members. He has been keeping bees since the 1970s, partly because he likes the honey they produce, but mainly because he is spellbound. "Beekeeping is a fascinating subject, and bees in themselves are so challenging," he says. "You get satisfaction from managing what are quite difficult animals. The idea of looking after 50,000 bees can be quite intimidating for some people, but it's a very rewarding craft."

He has concerns about the way data on CCD was collected in America, and claims the survey methods, in which beekeepers were asked to fill in questionnaires only if they had incurred losses, would make "any university statistician fall off their chair laughing". The syndrome is "no more than sporadic" in the UK, he says, and is dwarfed by the impact of varroa. "The varroa mite is taking out nine in 10 of the wild colonies," he says. "Beekeepers who are not up to speed will likely lose their bees, and, in fact, are losing their bees already." He refers to bees as a livestock species, little different from cattle, sheep and goats. Given they benefit the annual UK economy, through pollination to the tune of £200million, the £10million promised by the government for research seems like a pittance. Teale doesn't blame the Department For Environment, Food And Rural Affairs (Defra) - "they're just not given the resources" - but emphasises that the problems facing bees are urgent, and serious. "Some people predict the total extinction of bees in the wild," he says. "Personally, as a biologist and a geneticist, I think that's extremely unlikely. But numbers could get down to vanishingly low, which would have a major impact on the amount of pollination that occurs in the environment. The biological system will survive, but it will change, and it might not be what we would like it to be."