Ö÷²¥´óÐã

The Western world, with a few notable exceptions, poured billions of dollars into electronic pesticides to defeat the Y2K bug. Only to find that for the most part it could have been defeated by turning the systems off then on again. Shades of the hit C4 comedy . In reality it's the solution put forward in Stephen Fry's Archive on Four next Saturday by Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge University, a world authority. Here - exclusive to the blog - is the full interview Stephen conducted with Ross on the crisis that fizzled out and the prospects of a real future digital Armageddon:

So, why the silence when the bug didn't bite? The answer's in the programme. Politicians, experts and businessmen all profited in status or cash from the threat. In the media - to paraphrase the crime reporters - it bled so it led. In the USA, government brazenly claimed victory for its defeat. In reality, the enemy was almost totally imaginary. But it's useless blaming the great and the good. It was inevitable. We'd been told repeatedly that this brilliant new technology would change the world. Then we were told it could all stop on the stroke of one spookily special midnight. We were the newly addicted, suddenly faced with the prospect that our supply was fatally endangered. There was only one thing we could do. Panic. Then spend millions fixing it. Sorry, that's two things.

Nick Baker is Producer of In the Beginning was the Nerd.

• Stephen Fry's In the Beginning was the Nerd transmits in the Archive on 4 slot on Saturday 3 October at 2000.
• Ross Anderson's .
• by Wikipedia. Likewise '', a related term.
• Stephen Fry and he's . And, since you asked, .
• The picture, is by . Used .

It is a grand moment to get Desert Island Discs (DIDs) on the iPlayer. We have always had good relations with the family of the programme's founding father - Roy Plomley - but the programme was conceived in a pre-digital age and so we needed to work out with the family how to make the programme available online as well as for its two transmissions.

We have now sorted it all out and we have plans to make the website an all-singing, all-dancing affair - encouraging people to compare their choices with the choices of castaways, looking at the most selected tracks etc. etc. And we will end up podcasting DIDs too.

For the time being we're off to the races with Barry Manilow - and the programme will be available to listen to on the web site - along with the rest of the Radio 4 schedule.

It is a great programme - doing wonderfully I think with Kirsty Young.

DIDs' moments? Princess Margaret with Roy Plomley (a curio), Sue Lawley and Simon Cowell (not a great meeting of minds), Kirsty and Humphrey Lyttelton, Kirsty and Andrew Neil (moving), Kirsty and Yoko Ono, Sue and Isaiah Berlin and many, many more. It's a treat in my week. I rarely miss it and I now have no excuse.

I still yearn for Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Madonna, Arsene Wenger etc. etc. Stay tuned. We're trying.

• You'll be able to listen again to Desert Island Discs on the programme's home page, starting with today's Barry Manilow episode.
• The picture shows the programme's inventor and long-time presenter Roy Plomley in 1942, the year the programme was first broadcast. The picture is from the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's picture library and the caption reads: "Roy Plomley, script-writer of 'Hurrah for Hollywood', 'Show Souvenirs', 'Lady from Texas' and 'Desert Island Discs' series; actor and compere, 1942." You can see some more Desert Island Discs pictures from the archive .

I first met ten years ago - her book, 'The Gentleman's Daughter' had just been published, and she gave an interview to our local paper. Something about the interview made me think she would be good on the radio - her liveliness and her sense of fun came across, even in a print interview. I was right - when I called her, and we met for coffee, I realised that her warmth and her quick wit made her a radio natural. It took another ten years before we would work together - meanwhile, I was promoted to a job where I was no longer making radio programmes, and Amanda was winning prizes for her books, appearing as a regular contributor on programmes like 'Saturday Review', and becoming a Professor. When I went back to making radio programmes as a freelance producer, she was one of the first people I called.

I have always been fascinated by the history of domestic life. I often think of my grandmothers and great-grandmothers and their lives at home, the hard labour of it all, but also the real creative pleasure. On my study wall I have framed some of the beautiful miniature dolls' clothes my grandmother made me as a child: works of art. I'm pleased that our series includes a programme on sewing, and values the time and creativity of the many women who spent, and continue to spend, time on sewing, craftwork, decorating their homes. But the series goes much wider than that - it's as much about men as women, and the real pleasure husbands and fathers took in home. It's not fashionable to admit it, but for many men too, domestic life provides the greatest happiness.

The challenge of this big series was to make each afternoon programme a satisfying story in itself, but to join them together in a coherent week for the Friday night Omnibus (2100 on Friday). Each week has a theme, and over the six weeks we move from the 16th to the 20th century. The programmes are all very different: some are funny, some very dark - like the terrible diary of domestic violence from the early nineteenth century. Some have dozens of voices in them, some are just the story of one person, drawn from intimate letters and diaries. I thought of it like constructing a quilt - each piece very different, some plain, some embroidered, but sewn together, a pattern emerges.

As Amanda began to write the stories in the series, and we met every week for coffee to discuss the latest programme, I began to wonder about music. Were there songs which would illustrate our themes? My friend David Owen Norris, a brilliant concert pianist and Professor of Music, put me in touch with a young academic, Wiebke Thormahlen. She began to search libraries for songs about drunken husbands, burglars, housework. And it was extraordinary what she found - a protest song about women's servitude from the 18th century; a comic song about seducing a woman who never stops talking; and my favourite, 'The Housewife's Lament', in which an early nineteenth century housewife describes the unremitting toil of her life, cleaning, cooking, ironing, and imagines a never-ending tide of dirt coming towards her. When I showed this to a young man, he thought it was funny, and it does have a twist in the end; but for me it almost makes me cry (you can hear verses from it in week 1, week 2 and week 4 of the series).

Once Wiebke Thormahlen and David Owen Norris had gathered a pile of sheet music, we found some great singers to bring it to life - these are not songs which have been recorded before. Thomas Guthrie is a baritone and opera director - I'd seen him in Aldeburgh, singing an extraordinary 'Wintereisse' with puppets. Our other singer, Gwyneth Herbert, doesn't usually sing this kind of song at all - she's a singer-songwriter who writes her own material, and appears at venues like Ronnie Scott's. But I'd heard her interviewed on Radio 4, and started listening to her songs, and loved the way she brought such emotional power to her performances. It's a haunting voice.

We recorded the music in David Owen Norris's keyboard room at the University of Southampton one Saturday; it's a large space packed with a variety of instruments so we could move round the room from the harpsichord to the forte piano to the modern piano as the series moved through the centuries. David arranged the sig tune too - a take on the old song 'Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron', played in the style of different periods. The first week starts with a simple harpsichord - by week 6, the song's moved into boogie-woogie jazz piano.

Any big series like this depends on having the right team. We were lucky enough to be able to book engineer Jon Calver to record the music; and to attract a team of first-class actors - among them Deborah Findlay, John Sessions and Madeleine Brolly - to read for us. The home team at Loftus - Jo Coombs, David Smith and Tobin Coombs - dealt with actors' agents, read scripts, suggested changes, and improvised sound effects. Loftus is a small and highly prestigious production company, who specialise in crafted features and documentaries - and it has been a pleasure working with them.

It's been such a big project - we've been working on it for a year now. You can probably tell what enormous fun it's been to bring the voices of the past to life in such a substantial series. I am really looking forward to hearing what you think of it!

Elizabeth Burke is Producer of A History of Private Life

• A History of Private Life, a 30-part series presented by Amanda Vickery, begins on 28 September at 1545.
• There are two lovely features about the series on the Radio 4 web site: one by Amanda Vickery about the programme's research methods and one by Wiebke Thormahlen about the music.
• The picture is , from the : a work in the public domain.

Guantanamo Bay: 245 prisoners.
US camps in Iraq: 8,305 prisoners.

They're in two relatively small camps near Baghdad. The third - and most used - Camp Bucca, in the southern desert, has just closed.

Here's a taste of it:

editor's note: these remarkable pictures, taken by Hugh Sykes in a US 'theatre internment facility' in Iraq, caught my eye on the PM blog. See the rest of the pictures and leave comments on the original post - SB.

I think if anyone had thought it worth asking me about creating a series of short animations based on clips from Just a Minute, I'd have said something like "don't bother. It'll never work". Thankfully, nobody asked me and the resulting videos are all brilliant - really witty collisions of words and images. This one's by . And it's lovely to hear Clement Freud's voice again. Makes me wonder what other Radio 4 content could be revived in this way? The Moral Maze? The Archers? The Shipping Forecast?

They call the animations Just a Minute Reloaded and you're encouraged to embed them on your own web site. Just click the 'embed' button. Spread the joy.

• David Thair's Ö÷²¥´óÐã Comedy Blog often features Radio 4 programmes as well as lots of television comedy that obviously originated on Radio 4 in the first place.
• The current series of Just a Minute, in its native pure audio form, has two more episodes to go. Listen again here.

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 exposed hillside, 1000 feet above sea level - trees heavy with apples as big as your fist and storybook-sized turnips bursting from the soil.

For Costing the Earth we've set our new presenter, Dr. Alice Roberts - fresh from TV's 'Coast' - the challenge of tracking down the minerals we've lost from our staple foods in the past seventy years. Perthshire growers, Moira and Cameron Thomson are convinced they've found them again, languishing as waste in their local quarry. By adding rock dust they believe they can mimic the action of ice ages, recharging the soil with the vital minerals that should make their way into the fruit and veg they grow.

Alice and I tucked into some incredibly sweet gooseberries and munched on freshly pulled endive while Cameron pulled parsnips out of the ground, in search of one big enough to really impress us. Giving up, he took us back into the farmhouse to show us a frozen head of broccoli that could feed a family of five for a week. Over coffee Cameron took pencil and paper to explain his theories of geological shifts, climate change and shifting ice sheets. There's nothing Alice likes more than a good scientific argument so I sat back and sipped my coffee as they tore into each other over the crashing impact of ice sheets on the Highland landscape.

When I finally steered Alice back to the car Moira waved us off with the news that the inspiration for their theories- and their vocation over the past twenty years- came from a Radio 4 programme they heard in 1983. I'll leave the scientists to judge the detail of their ideas, but if Radio 4 inspired those gooseberries thriving on a blasted hillside then we've contributed just a little to civilisation.

• Costing the Earth - The Great Mineral Heist is broadcast at 0900 on Monday 28th September and repeated at 1330 on Thursday 3rd October.
• Farming Today covered the soil depletion story this morning at 0545. Listen again.
• The picture shows Moira and Cameron Thomson and is used with their permission.

Going against the grain in front of your peers takes some doing in any sphere and one of the reasons Iconoclasts has provoked such interest is because our well-known, heavyweight speakers come on and present genuinely iconoclastic views which attract robust challenge - not least from other experts in their own field. So at least we know it's working.

When we were shaping the series we wanted to find people who could talk passionately from a position of experience and knowledge so that even the most provocative views could be the start of serious debate from a less predictable place. And, of course, as important has been including the views and comments of the Radio 4 audience while the show is live on air. And they've certainly been letting us know what they think during the last couple of shows.

When we were considering this subject area, we'd talked to Clive Murray, Assistant Chief Constable of Tayside, who had made comments about the age of consent earlier this year and received a strong reaction from the media, but it was while researching through the areas that we discovered the legal academic John Spencer from who is on record taking a similar line.

He plans to use his opening 5 minutes at the top of tomorrow night's programme to set out his argument - which will include looking at other European countries where for example the age of consent is lower than here.

He'll then have to brace himself for the challenge from studio panellists and comments from the listeners as the debate gets underway. The programme goes live from just after the 8 O'Clock news and Edward Stourton will be in the chair to direct what we expect to be a lively discussion - including those e-mails and texts. So if you've got something to say make sure you get your views to us and you can do that by sending them to iconoclasts@bbc.co.uk.

Christine Morgan is Head of Religion, Radio at the Ö÷²¥´óÐã

• Iconoclasts will be transmitted live on Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 4 tomorrow evening at 2000.
• The Daily Mail this morning.
• by . Used .

One of my delights over the past few years has been following the so-called 'children of the Olympic bid'. If you've missed it let me fill you in.

These are the youngsters who back in 2005 played a key but little known role in snatching the games for London from under the Parisian nose. Aged between twelve and sixteen at the time, they were selected from east end schools to demonstrate the diversity that London would bring to the games.

Up on stage, as Sebastian Coe put the London case to the International Olympic Committee. Their contrast with 'the suits' that the other cities had on show might just have made all the difference.

I was in Singapore at the time, but I have to admit, it was my producer who cooked up the idea with our commissioning editor at Radio 4 that we should follow these youngsters all the way through to the games themselves and see how their lives were shaped by the event they'd done so much to bring about.

It's been a joy! The first in the current series went out last Monday. We've spent a good deal of this week editing and scripting the second programme.

The great thing about these youngsters is that they have been so welcoming, so frank, so un-phased by having microphones thrust in front of them. There's a presumption that teenagers between about thirteen and seventeen are loathe to utter more than a monosyllable, but nothing could have been further from the truth with this group.

They've welcomed me into their homes, let me watch at close quarters their disasters, sporting and otherwise, and then politely answered questions about them! Talked about their love lives, their beliefs, their ambitions, without a hint of defensiveness. None of this "lessons will have been learned from this". When things go well for them, they share their uninhibited delight; when they screw up, they tell you what went wrong! Anyone with a jaundiced view of today's younger generation should listen to them; they could learn a lot!

You and Yours has also thrown up two particular delights for me this week: first of all my guest on Monday was Margaret Mountford, the businesswoman who has become something of a heroine to viewers of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's 'Apprentice' for her withering look when dismissing the antics of Lord Sugar's most excruciating job applicants.

The You and Yours team have had quite a lot of fun trying to explain to me what a 'withering' look is; one of the great advantages to having been blind from birth, is that withering looks can be safely ignored!

I think Margaret must have got most of her withering looks out of the way while she and the producer negotiated over what she would, and wouldn't answer questions on!

By the time she got to me, she was all smiles (one of the joys of being a presenter; we're a cosseted bunch). She was only too happy to talk about women in the city, the fact that a lot of people came on The Apprentice just to secure a career in television, and even what she thought of a man whose nose was ensured for five million pounds, because it was so good at grading cheese.

But an even higher point than that was my trip on one of the first Greyhound buses to make a scheduled journey in Britain, from Southampton to London.

The iconic American company (actually now British-owned) reckons it can make a go of it here, but we probably haven't helped! And it was all going so well: barrelling up the motorway, Managing Director giving me his pitch, American studies academic waxing lyrical about the music the Greyhound had inspired! In fact, my worry was that this could all turn into far too much of a puff for the company!

I needn't have worried: somewhere near Windlesham in Surrey, so far not a subject of popular song, a keening, whining sound impinged on my interviewing. It quickly became apparent that we were losing power: Soon, with a nifty bit of piloting, the driver slid us to a halt on the hard shoulder! We'd broken down! It's the moment a company dreads

I have to be fair; they took it on the chin, fronted up for the inevitable interview, and summoned taxis to take everyone on to their final destinations. In fact, judging by the response to our programme, its probably done them less harm than they think; but, given that one of their great selling-points was tickets for a pound, I did rather treasure the pay-off: the lady who phoned her son to tell him what had happened, only to receive back this text: "you get what you pay for, mother".

• Series four of Children of the Olympic bid is on-air now.
• The picture shows Ashley Mitchell whose 'light-touch organisational unorthodoxy' features in episode two of Children of the Olympic bid.
• Peter's Greyhound Bus item was on Friday's You and Yours and Margaret Mountford's on last Monday's.

The idea behind the series was to find primary sources and to uncover original documents which might give some clues as to why the Bermuda Triangle myth caught on in the first place, and why it has endured for so long - and of course to get a sense of whether there is any truth in it. So it took a long time - about a year - to put together.

The real driving force behind it all was reporter Tom Mangold, with whom I worked extremely closely all through the research, recording and editing stages. It was his idea in the first place, and it was his passion and his extraordinary detective tenacity which made it all work. There is something rather attractive about the idea of setting a hard-nosed, investigative journalist the task of getting to the bottom of a myth, and it was quite something to behold when Tom gave some of the myth-mongers a courteous, fair but rigorous grilling.

One author we tracked down to his large house in Florida eventually unlocked the chain around his fence and invited us to talk in his garden about his part in genesis of the Bermuda Triangle 'mystery' . He ended up warming to Tom and finally admitting that he had 'spiced up' his book in order to make it more interesting.

There are three lines of enquiry throughout the series: first, we looked at the stories, articles and books which set up the myth in the 1950s and 60s, and some of those which have kept the pot boiling ever since; second, we spoke to historians and psychologists about the human need for mystery and conspiracy; and lastly we took several 'inexplicable' maritime and aircraft disappearances and did some thorough 21st century investigations into probable causes with the help of an air accident investigator and Lloyds Register in London.

Tom remains skeptical throughout, and virtually everything he uncovers suggests some very terrestrial and very human causes of the events and accounts of the Bermuda Triangle. However, we don't want to be complete spoil-sports and we did speak to some plausible people who remain convinced that they have experienced 'something weird out there". As ever, in my job, the real privilege was meeting the characters who gave us their time and their stories - and we met a lot, in the UK in the USA and in Bermuda itself.

And it was a privilege too, working with one of the world's best journalists and finest travelling companions. Indeed I have to admit, on the recording trip to the Triangle, more than one bottle of wine went missing without trace.

Adam Fowler is Producer of Inside the Bermuda Triangle: the Mysteries Solved

Adam sent this fascinating interview with a prominent Bermuda Triangle skeptic for exclusive use here on the blog:

Adam has also given me a full-length recording of the haunting song written and recorded specially for the programme:

• Inside the Bermuda Triangle: the Mysteries Solved is a five-part documentary made by . Listen again on the Radio 4 web site.
• , one of the foundation texts of the Bermuda Triangle myth, by Vincent H. Gaddis, published in Argosy Magazine, February 1964.
• Picture, , by . Used .

The hipsters at have given two pages of the latest issue to a survey of the best and worst of the world's soap operas - from Hollyoaks to Knots Landing and from Grange Hill to Dallas. Thrillingly, it's not Eastenders or The Sopranos (fairly flexible definition of 'soap' in use here) that tops the list of the best ever, but The Archers. What can we say? We're speechless.

Editor's note - Simon Elmes is Radio 4's Creative Director, producer of some of the network's most important arts programming and author of a history of Radio 4. He's recorded 18 definitions from Dr Johnson's great 1755 dictionary for broadcast between programmes between 5 and 18 September - from 'art' to 'world', via 'credit', 'mayor' and 'woman'. I asked him to record a short item about the task. SB.

• Listen to all 18 definitions and to the other programmes in the A-Z of Dr Johnson.
• Follow . Honestly.

Here's a lovely thing. A colleague pointed out that the producers of the excellent Last Chance to See TV series with Stephen Fry have dug out the original Douglas Adams radio series from 1989 and put all the episodes on their web site to listen to. A real treat.

• Episode 1 of Last Chance to See, created by Mark Carwardine, who also created the original radio series, was on Ö÷²¥´óÐã 2 Sunday and, thanks to 'series catch-up', you've got two months to watch it.
• The Last Chance to See radio programmes are here.
• The picture shows Douglas Adams (left) and Mark Carwardine in a publicity shot for the radio programme that I found in the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's picture library, Elvis.

I went to the Gardeners' Question Time annual Summer (sic) party over the weekend - at the Northern headquarters at - just outside Harrogate. It was not Summery. The wind blew hard and it was cloudy - but it was fun - and the first time we've held the party away from the programme's Southern base at . We are establishing a GQT garden/plot at Harlow Carr in an attempt to find out more about differences in growing conditions between the North and South of England - and the experiments will provide useful editorial material for the programme - for instance, in measuring the impact of climate change.

Gardeners' Question Time is now made by the independent company . (It had previously been made very well by Taylormade - who bowed out voluntarily in the summer after a long stint). We are not planning any upheaval to the programme - but some things have already changed. We are placing the features within the programme in a different way - and I think it makes for a better listen. The web site is improved and the programme is now also available as a podcast. Audience figures have held up well in recent years. The most recent RAJAR figures show that over the course of a typical week over 1.4 million people catch at least 5 minutes the programme - a figure that has remained essentially unchanged in the last 5 years.

Of course the questions and answers from the audience remain the central plank of Gardeners' Question Time and on a personal note I am perpetually amazed at how the panellists answer anything that's thrown at them without so much as a note or book in sight. And they have no advance notice of the questions at all. Amazing.

• Listen again to Gardeners Question Time and subscribe to the podcast.
• The Ö÷²¥´óÐã's press release about the choice of Somethin' Else for GQT.

It was thirty-nine pages of green paper, a carbon-copy, in amongst hundreds of scripts and notes I'd bought from a young man in Devon. In late 2005 he'd listed on eBay a framed photograph that his description claimed had once belonged to Kenneth Williams. The starting bid was 99p, there were no bidders. It turned out he was Williams's godson, left £30,000 and fifty-percent of the comedy-actor's belongings when he had died in mysterious circumstances in 1988. To raise money for a snow-boarding holiday, the godson planned to put each item on the site, piece by piece. I asked how much he'd take for all of it and to my delight we did a deal; it felt right that this collection should stay together.

While other teenagers in the nineties were mad for Oasis, I lay in my bedroom listening to cassette tapes of The Goons and Hancock's Half Hour loaned from Manchester's Central Library. For some peculiar reason this love had never extended to and . Yet, as I lay in bed over a decade later, assessing my newly acquired hoard for a new biography of Williams, I began to read the green script. The voices, the sound effects, the jokes, came alive. Headed "Twice Ken is Plenty", the pages only featured Kenneths Horne and Williams. I'd just assumed it was the latter's copy of a Round the Horne episode. Unlike the majority of the other papers it didn't have any of his own annotations, nor did it include the other members of the team (, and the like). Eventually I wanted to hear it for myself, but a call to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã archive put me in the picture: "No, it's not one we have listed." I vividly remember thinking this'd make a great radio show in the same style as , another Radio 4 favourite of mine wherein actors re-created old Marx Brothers' scripts.

So, here we are in 2009 with the two best Kenneth Williams and Kenneth Horne impersonators, an audience of hundreds, in the historic Radio Theatre in Broadcasting House, and before my eyes (and ears) it is happening. I imagine in my mind that it's the Sixties, pretending it's for real, which, if you close your eyes, it certainly is. I've since had emails saying as much. Within a few hours one of Williams's friends wrote, "About a third of the way into listening I forgot it wasn't Williams or Horne... it sounded to me like a bona fide 60s episode! Utterly authentic."

And I'm thrilled it hit a right note with his fans, whose appetite for anything Kenneth is insatiable. Why is that? Why does he intrigue us so much? Why, after dozens of documentaries, best of compilations, and his diaries, letters and my own book utilizing all this unseen material, do we still need more? For me, it's the paradox of the broken-hearted clown, the man who was loved by millions but who found it impossible to love himself. Add to that his exceptional talent, his amusing vocal dexterity and his ability to appeal to all ages, all generations, and you have a unique man who is exceptionally hard to forget.

is the presenter and co-producer of Twice Ken is Plenty

• Listen again to Twice Ken is Plenty - the lost script of Kenneth Williams.
• The pictures show a page from the script and Robin Sebastian as Kenneth Williams and Jonathan Rigby as Kenneth Horne, during the recording. There are some lovely production pictures on the programme's web page.
• Twice Ken is Plenty - the lost Kenneth Williams Script : "...the result of their efforts was a joy".

A fine kerfuffle (if that's the right word) on Today this morning about - you guessed it - Twitter. Read on the Today site. And what do you think? Are there things that you should be allowed to dismiss out of hand? Is social media phenonemon Twitter one of them?

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 and we miss them.

Clive's been a crucial part of this project, not just because he's been there to guide us through the process of beekeeping but also because he's an interviewer's dream - relaxed, clear, funny and able to get across what he's saying simply. And he's dedicated to his cause - to ensure the future of the honey bee. Fran and I went to see him recently at the apiary where the Farming Today bees normally live because he wanted to take us through treatments for .

These are the parasitic mites capable of destroying whole colonies if not treated - and viewed as the biggest threat to honey bee populations. He showed us two chemical treatments which kill off the mites - one in a gel and the other on sticky strips, both of which are put in the hives and which the bees transfer around. But he also showed us a treatment using a more common substance - icing sugar. Once covered in it the bees groom themselves - and groom off the mite which is also said to have difficulty clinging to an iced bee. It was an unusual site to have dusty white bees swarming around us as we treated each frame.

Clive was keen to emphasise to us the importance of using all three of these methods. There are concerns about bees developing resistance to varroa treatments and by using a variety of methods we can help avoid this.

• The video was made by the Farming Today team and features Farming Today bloggers Charlotte Smith, Chris Impey and Fran Barnes.
• Previous posts about the Farming Today bees from the Radio 4 blog.