There are fourteen jars of honey on the counter by the kettle, and another eight inside the kitchen dresser. For breakfast we will drizzle acacia honey over muesli, or spread rich, dark honeydew honey – collected by bees from the sap excreted by aphids – on rye bread, or perhaps we will try a spoon of sharp, fruity buckwheat honey. After dinner we might compare French, Italian and German chestnut honeys, though it requires the experienced beekeeper’s tongue to detect that the smoother Italian honey has been dried, maybe to delay fermentation, or to compensate for collecting the honey before it has matured. For Willi, who once spent a summer in the chestnut forests of southern Germany, the authentic taste of chestnut honey is unmistakeable. Yet the best honey is a mysterious, black, Italian, treacle-like substance with the distinctive bitter flavour of coffee as it melts sweetly in the mouth.

But here I am guilty of an English obsession with flavour.

Romania is a leading authority in apitherapy, and developed some of its most important research and remedies during the years of communism. Willi sells it to us with his own story, which sounds too good to be true. One Christmas, his central heating exploded and burned his leg through to the flesh; not wanting to go to hospital at Christmas, he applied some honey to the burn and after three weeks of honey dressings, his leg had healed perfectly. Another anecdote is prompted by the discovery of a plastic bottle of homemade wine hidden in the corner of the larder, given to Willi by a grateful neighbour after he came round with a deep cut and was given a tincture of propolis (the sweet, amber, antibacterial substance secreted by bees to prevent foreign objects like mice from contaminating the hive) to put on the cut, which again healed perfectly. Everything has concentrated goodness. Bee stings are good for rheumatism, pollen helps indigestion (the soft, sandy fresh pollen is infinitely preferable to the dried stuff sold in shops), honeydew honey helps with bronchitis and respiratory problems. It goes on for books and books.

This is all a world apart from the commercial bargaining of the global honey wholesale market, in which a kilo of honey costs something like: €10 from the UK, €2.50 from Romania, €1.50 from Ukraine, and 70 cents from China. Here, the story of honey is one of hypocrisy and corruption. The biggest honey consumers are in the West, yet most honey is produced outside the West, where loose regulation, long transport routes and ingenious substitutes obstruct transparency and ensure low prices. For the Western consumer the result is perfect: high standards of Western beekeeping and expensive honey exports, and cheap honey whenever desired.

Willi’s distrust of such globalisation comes from his own experiences working as an organic certifier for a French company and witnessing the rampant corruption. But it also comes from the subsidies offered by the European Union and the Romanian State to encourage beekeeping, which have artificially and unhealthily inflated the numbers of hives across Romania and made a few people very rich. This distrust seems to reflect, on the one hand, a deep, vindictive hatred of anything connected to the state, and on the other, a bitter antipathy to multinational companies that suck money and life out of eastern European countries.

So like bees that swarm to survive, leaving behind infections and doing away with unproductive queens, Willi has left the old communist beekeeping association with its out-of-date advice and register of ghost beekeepers, and has set up his own association. This has provided him with a network of like-minded beekeepers working organically. But he struggles to convince them to sell their honey directly to customers rather than the wholesale market, which bleeds beekeepers dry but retains some kind of elusive hold over them.

Willi is an example of entrepreneurship at its most principled: anti-state, anti-corporate, independent, honest, and integrated into a local economy in which money does not simply disappear. But in the end it all depends on the thing at the centre of it all: honey. It doesn’t need enhancing and it doesn’t need marketing. People will always want it.