Musicians, artists or chefs are said to have a revolutionary spirit; less so beekeepers. Indeed, a first encounter with Johannes Gruber in Buch am Buchberg in Styria does little to challenge this cliché. However, it soon becomes clear that a revolutionary heart does beat in Johannes Gruber’s chest, fighting for greater awareness and consideration of origins, this time in regard to honey. Earlier on he believed in the natural power of wines, grown organically, bottled free of contamination. The Styrian sold them in Paris and the south of France at a time when in Austria biodynamics was something talked about behind closed doors.

Today, revolutionaries regard organic and natural wines as old hat. Maybe that’s why Johannes Gruber fills up jars with landscapes made from honey, and why he’s moved back from France to the hills of eastern Styria. Here he’s busy shaking up the assumption that there’s just simple flower and forest honey. “In the honey, the bees reflect the landscapes they live in”, all within a radius of four kilometres (two and a half miles). It could be compared to a Grand Cru from Burgundy, where the wine grown in a few hectares characterises its region. “A jar of wood honey, please,” is not good enough for Gruber. The order should be for “a jar of Stuhleck mountain wood honey, vintage 2013”. Several of the nomadic beekeeper’s hives stand at the Stuhleck, in the foothills of the Fischbacher Alps, 1,200 metres (4000 feet) above sea level. He doesn’t carry his hives to the meadows on his back like they used to 200 years ago: these days bees travel by car, in Gruber’s case an old VW van criss-crossing southern and eastern Styria. This can be up to three times per season, whenever a bloom has faded and it’s time to move on into the forest or to a field of sunflowers.

The bees are always busy gathering and filling up the honeycombs with fresh honey, from buckwheat pollen or cherry orchards near the Slovenian border. Gruber takes out and the full honeycombs and replaces them with empty ones. “You only need to know what is in bloom when and where, and of course you also have to be on good terms with the farmers,” says the beekeeper. They profit from the bees on their land, too: it’s an ingenious system that couldn’t have been designed better by an economist, a win-win solution for everyone, and 40–50 kilos (88–110 pounds) per comb. “That’s even though beekeeping avoids industrialisation as much as possible,” the former wine trader explains. The bees just can’t cope with it. Maximising profits or splitting bee populations too often to keep even more hives doesn’t work. “The bees will die.” A beekeeper’s job is to ensure that there’s always enough but not too much space in the hives. “The temperature is crucial. If the hive’s too big it gets too cold. If there are too many bees in one place there’s a risk that they’ll swarm out,” settling instead in a tree trunk or somewhere else more suitable and comfortable. To avoid that, the bees need visiting at least once every ten days, which limits the number of bee populations a beekeeper can look after. In Johannes Gruber’s case that’s an impressive 200, with 40,000 or more animals per hive in the summer.

In certain weather conditions, such as heavy rains, the 8 million insects need to be seen more often, as the danger of swarming out is greater. Not surprisingly, Gruber’s VW camper van has run up quite a distance. During the season, which starts mid-March with the flowering of the cherry up to neophytes such as laburnum and impatiens in September, there’s hardly time to catch your breath; after that the bees want to be left in peace. “Feeding the animals with sugar water for the winter finishes at the end of September.” Then it’s waiting, putting together empty hives for the coming season and selling the past summer’s honey. In the meantime the winter bees snuggle up around the queen until late February, when she begins to lay eggs for the coming summer’s generation, the bees who can’t wait to go searching for the best nectar in Styria.