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BBC Radio 4 - 92 to 94 FM and 198 Long Wave

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OPEN COUNTRY

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	PROGRAMME INFO

	Saturday 6.10-6.35am Repeated Thursday 1.30-2.00pm


	From Shetland to the Scilly Isles, Open Country travels the UK in search of the stories, the people and the wildlife that make our countryside such a vibrant place. Each week we visit a new area to hear how local people are growing the crops, protecting the environment, maintaining the traditions and cooking the food that makes their corner of rural Britain unique. Email: [email protected] Postal address: Open Country, BBC Radio 4, Birmingham, B5 7QQ.


	LISTEN AGAIN


	Listen to Open Country for 6 August 2005


	PRESENTERS

	HELEN MARK and RICHARD URIDGE



	More about Helen Mark




	More about Richard Uridge


	PROGRAMME DETAILS

	Saturday 6 August 2005
In this week's programme Richard travels to Hampshire to a small patch of heath land just off the A3. No more than 20 paces from the car park, he meets arachnologist Dick Jones and Myrmecologist Glenda Orlidge. They show him an underground world teeming with life. Richard helps Dick Jones catch spiders with a special suction tube, he brushes away a litter of leaves to discover a host of spiders' webs and Dick explains how each web is freshly made each day. The webs are double stranded, the first strand acts almost as scaffolding as the spider works its way around, constructing a web of such precision because it is important to have zero tension at its centre as this enables the spider to instantly gauge where the prey has stuck in the web. British Arachnological Society Spiders tend to be solitary creatures and rarely live in social groups, ants on the other hand live in nests containing tens of thousands. Each has a defined role to support the colony and they act in such a sophisticated way that it has led some people to comment that they act as one large organism. It's a wild world hidden in the undergrowth. Glenda tells Richard of ants that capture babies and bring them up to act as nurse maids to their own brood. UK Safari: ants Richard takes a break from the heath and travels to the village of Odium to meet Geoff Galliver. He has been keeping bees for years. Bees have a complex social structure too, the hive can contain 100,000 bees yet only one queen. She lays up to 2,000 eggs a day, replacing the dead workers who fall exhausted from their labours. Bees live for only a couple of weeks, busy travelling back and forth searching out the best source of nectar. Richard gets a closer encounter with the bees than he bargained for when one of the little creatures gives him a sharp reminder of their defensive capabilities and stings him. UK Safari: bees Email Open Country: [email protected] The BBC is not responsible for external web sites

	RELATED LINKS BBC Holiday Category BBC Country file