Tagged with: Farming
Posts (13)
BBC Food and Farming Awards - An Update
Sheila Dillon
Presenter, The Food Programme, Radio 4
We've big news about the next BBC Food & Farming Awards. Read this blog post for details.
Roger Bolton interviews Archers editor Vanessa Whitburn
Roger Bolton
Editor's note: Feedback is Radio 4's weekly accountability programme. Each week, while the programme is on-air, we're publishing one item from the programme here on the blog for your comment. This week's item is about The Archers. Roger Bolton introduces it - SB. Some Archers listeners remember...
Heather honey and hard work
Fran Barnes
Picture the scene. Blue sky... singing birds... the rolling Derbyshire moorland covered in a blushing pink eiderdown as beekeepers across the country arrive for the annual ritual of taking the bees to the heather. That's how it should have been on that August day when the Farming Today bees ar...
Searching for our lost minerals
Alasdair Cross
Drive through the southern Highlands between Braemar and Pitlochry at this time of year and they look pretty bleak. After thirty miles of bleached heather it comes as a shock to see a splash of colour on the horizon. Drive closer and you come to a couple of acres of luxuriant vegetation on an ex...
The Farming Today bees in living colour!
Chris Impey
The Farming Today bees are on holiday in Derbyshire. Fran and Clive (our beekeeping mentor) took them up to the moors one rainy night. They're on a farm feeding off the heather. We're hoping, all being well, this well produce a crop of very rich tasting honey. They've been away a few weeks now a...
Sheila Dillon's week
Sheila Dillon
Presenter, The Food Programme, Radio 4
Lunch yesterday at one of London's poshest restaurants - not, as many people think, what I normally spend my life doing, but a chance for me to eavesdrop on a meeting about the future of Slow Food UK. In Italy Slow Food is a powerful political force, in the UK it's been a lot less than that whic...
How to stop your bees leaving home
Chris Impey
We may only have had our bees a couple of months, but they're already thinking of leaving us. Bees swarm as a natural way of increasing their numbers - typically over half of the colony will leave. But we don't want to lose so many of them just as they're starting to make us honey. They've been...
When Farming Today bees go bad
Fran Barnes
It was all going so well when I first arrived at the apiary to do another routine check on the Farming Today beehive. There was a light breeze, the sky was blue, the birds were singing. I was just admiring the view and the wildlife when it happened. I wasn't anywhere near a hive and hadn't had ...
Honey cake help!
Charlotte Smith
Editor's note: I know I said that the Farming Today bees were off to their own blog a little while ago but we've now decided that they should stay here, on the Radio 4 blog, for the rest of the season. We've grown attached to them (and we like the honey). And, in a follow-up email, Charlotte app...
Keeping the Farming Today bees occupied
Fran Barnes
"The bees will beat us you know", our bee mentor, Clive Joyce, sagely told me yesterday while we tried, yet again, to stop the Farming Today beehive swarming. Clive is usually the voice of optimism, but even he - when faced with more Queen Cells than he's ever seen - is preparing to face up to t...
