**1. Introduction**

Honey is a relatively expensive food product, but the prices vary largely. The differences in popularity and prices of honey are largely determined by factors such as country of origin and nectar plants, as well as the stories associated with the honey – who made it, when they made it, and where they made it. Hence, it is important to understand these stories behind each honey product.

There are various types of honey in the world, but information that we can obtain is limited. So, in this chapter, we start with a brief explanation of the status of beekeeping in the world, followed by an introduction to the history of Japanese beekeeping that is rarely told in western literatures written in English. We then share an overview of urban beekeeping that has gained popularity in recent years and discuss the risks and regulations surrounding the movement. In the last chapter, we show the results of our eDNA analysis of honey and indicate the validity of these results.

The history of beekeeping is showing that beekeeping is a part of culture of human society [1]. The beekeeping culture is historically included in regional food culture [2]. Urban beekeeping became one of the main ways of beekeeping in different regions of the world [3]. Urban environment can contribute to maintenance of diversity of honeybee species including native species [4]. Alternatively, the issues of pesticides are becoming serious in some countries [5], although the honeybee colony declines can be caused by complex factors including pesticides and global honey trade [6]. Trends of beekeeping and honey production in Japan and South Korea are analyzed in the previous study [7]. The transmission of the knowledge of beekeeping is the one of the research topics in the field of environmental studies [8].

As the IPBES assessment report suggested, management pollination services are an urgent global task. In this circumstance, urban beekeeping is gaining attention in terms of various aspects including ecosystem diversity, genetic diversity of honeybee, educational practices, and so on. The size of urban areas is relatively small as compared with farmland and other habitats of honeybee. However, the roles of urban areas to maintain the genetic diversity of organisms and to enhance the environmental awareness of citizens are suggested by the existing studies [4, 7], and urban beekeeping is expected as a main way of beekeeping. In the promotion of urban beekeeping, rack of scientific evidence of behavior of urban honeybee is a serious issue. To provide the scientific evidence, environmental DNA analysis can be utilized to detect the details of nectar sources. In this regard, this chapter reviews the status and trend of urban beekeeping and discusses the results of the application of environmental DNA analysis. The methods provided in this chapter can be applied for other cases and contribute to accumulating the scientific evidence for making relevant policies of urban beekeeping.
