Ketchup. Nothing better illustrates the mess we've made of managing the environment on which our survival depends. When you next plop it over your chips, as Dave Goulson points out in his enlightening account of a life studying bumblebees, consider that it was probably made in the Netherlands from tomatoes grown in Spain, pollinated by Turkish bumblebees reared in a factory in Slovakia.

When we think of bees, we imagine stripy creatures producing honey in hives tended by white-cloaked keepers. There are in fact 20,000 bee species. Honeybees – "the anorexic cousins of bumblebees", as Goulson rather dismissively describes them – have been domesticated for centuries and are drab in colour. Most bumblebees, of which there are 250 species, are more spectacular: the charismatic tigers of the insect world.

These wild insects are being commandeered by us because they are such expert pollinators. As recently as 1985, an enthusiast from Belgium discovered bumblebees were excellent at pollinating tomatoes, and the commercial breeding began. Growers of raspberries, cucumbers, aubergines and peppers around the world now import foreign-reared nests to improve their yields. Insects are cheaper slave-labour than humans and, as Goulson observes, bumblebees possess "powers of perception and learning that often put us mammals to shame".

Using bees sounds smart and could be good for the environment, but is this the whole story? There has been a mass extermination of insect life in the last half-century. Most is unseen because we know so little about the insects that perform crucial "ecosystem services", an ugly phrase used by ecologists to impress on us that we will only survive if insects also endure. The number of moths, a better-studied insect group than almost any other, fell by 40% in southern Britain between 1968 and 2007. Bumblebees have also nearly disappeared in less than a lifetime. When Goulson, a biology professor who founded the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, was born in 1965, the short-haired bumblebee was still common in southern England. By the time he went to university, in 1984, it was nearly extinct.

So having wiped out these natural pollinators in the pursuit of greater "efficiency" in farming, we are now putting them back in order to make money. Goulson found yields at a raspberry farm near Dundee increased by 8.3% thanks to commercial bumblebee boxes. Rather than sensibly seeking to boost wild insects, we pursue a quick fix of commercially bred bees, which turn out to spread fatal diseases among native species. Foreign species kept in greenhouses invariably escape and risk hybridising, or out-competing, the wild bumblebees.

Yet Goulson's book is not a depressing read: for him, insects have been a gateway into a fascination with the natural world – he collected butterflies, rescued stricken bees and bought taxidermy equipment from an entomological catalogue he read in the bath as an eight-year-old – at a time when industrial agriculture was ripping out the hedges and hay meadows on which they depend.

Goulson is good on the remarkable features of bumblebees, not least their body temperature. Flying bumblebees maintain a temperature of 35C, almost as warm as a human body – an astonishing characteristic given how much harder it is for a tiny being to keep warm. Flapping their wings 200 times per second generates heat but requires a colossal amount of energy: a running man consumes the calories in a Mars bar in one hour; a man-sized bumblebee would burn the same calories in less than 30 seconds. A bumblebee with a full stomach is only 40 minutes from starvation, so they have to eat almost constantly to keep warm. Pollen provides the protein-rich food they require and, unusually in the insect world, bees feed on pollen and nectar throughout their lives; adult females gather food for their offspring so their maggot-like larvae don't need to move at all.

The weird genetic properties of bumblebees explain why they live communally. If you are a female worker bee, the best way to pass on your genes is not to lay your own eggs (your offspring carry only 50% of your genes) but help your mother rear your sisters (who carry 75% of them). Despite this co‑operative impulse, Goulson unveils a vicious world of bee coups and revolutions.

In one experiment, he glued a tiny numbered disc to the backs of bees kept in his garden and released them to see if they could find their way home. "White 15" developed a regular commute to collect pollen from a borage field 3km away, equivalent to a man circumnavigating the globe 10 times to get the groceries. I would have liked more about bees in our culture, but Goulson has plenty of wondrous biological stories to tell, as well as the tale of his own struggle to return the short-haired bumblebee to Britain. He masterminded the release of bees from Sweden at Dungeness, on the Kent coast, last summer, and must be anxiously waiting to see if any survive this year.

Perhaps this, too, is playing God but, as Goulson shows, the carefully managed return of native bumblebee species has required the recreation of large-scale habitats that benefit all kinds of insects, birds and mammals. This is a transformation of our environment of a wholly benign kind.

• Patrick Barkham's The Butterfly Isles is published by Granta.