Plan to boost city hives is the ultimate in free-bees

Last year the Co-operative, which has 600 hives on its farmland around the country, piloted a scheme to train would-be beekeepers on allotments in Manchester.

Now the company is rolling out the idea to other areas in Manchester, London and Inverness, as part of its Plan Bee programme to help reverse falling numbers of the important pollinator.

The scheme, in which people attend a free two-day course, are provided with free kit, bees and an easy-to-use plastic "beehaus" hive if they are interested in keeping bees, is being run with the aim of getting 300 new beekeepers in the city centres.

An extra 225,000 announced today for Plan Bee will help fund the beekeeping scheme for city gardens and allotments, along with financing more research into the causes of bee declines.

It brings the total funding by the Co-operative for the programme, which was launched in January 2009, to 475,000 – this includes research, raising awareness of the honeybee's plight and efforts to encourage people to plant bee-friendly wildflowers.

Funding has gone to research into the potential impacts of pesticides known as neonicotinoids on bees. The research programme has also sponsored efforts to map where the native British black honeybees – believed to be hardier than the Italian honeybees most often used in hives – are found, so they can be used to breed tougher queens.

The company will also be giving away hundreds of thousands of packets of wildflower seeds, containing bee favourites such as poppies, cornflowers, white campion and corncockle.

Paul Monaghan, head of social goals at the Co-operative, said: "Nature's number one pollinating machine appears to be breaking down and no-one knows for sure why.

"Urban beekeeping is becoming increasingly popular and could be a vital tool in the reverse of honeybee decline in the UK."

He added: "Through our projects we want to show people that you don't have to have acres of land to take up beekeeping."

Last year the Westminster government's conservation agency, Natural England, urged householders in towns and cities to consider keeping bees in their gardens and on rooftops or even balconies to counter declining honeybee populations.

The agency also backed the launch of the "beehaus" design of beehive and called on people to support bees – including wild bumblebees – by planting insect-friendly plants in their gardens.

Bees play an important role in agriculture, with the value of commercial crops that benefit from bee pollination estimated at 100 million to 200m a year while honey is worth 10m-30m.

But bee populations face a growing number of threats including pests and diseases such as the varroa mite and a lack of habitat providing food sources such as wild flowers.

Numbers of honeybee colonies have fallen by between 6.7 per cent and almost 12 per cent a year over the past three years, according to government figures.