“Obama is creating a whole new political base among Cuban-Americans, ” says Francisco Aruca, a moderate Cuban-American radio-show host who also runs one of the charter companies flying to Cuba.

Francis Ratnieks, the UK's only professor of apiculture, is undertaking pioneering research using observation hives and video cameras to determine the plants and flowers that honeybees visit.

At other times he drives a bulldozer in "the pit", where rubbish trucks dump San Francisco's household waste, to be loaded onto bigger trucks also headed for the landfill.