We’ve big news about the next BBC Food & Farming Awards!

Usually at this time of year we’d be asking you to send in your nominations in our annual search for the best of British food and drink; from food producers to retailers, dinner ladies to street food cooks and farmers to drinks producers.

This year marks a departure for the awards we launched with the support of HRH, The Prince of Wales, back in 2000. Each year they’ve grown; both in terms of the range of food and drink categories we cover, to the number of nominations you send us.

This year, to reflect the continued rise in food and drink ideas across the UK, the growth of businesses and food projects in towns and cities in every region, we’ve  ambitions to make these awards even bigger.

We want to raise their profile to ensure they reach as big an audience as possible and to ensure the awards provide the biggest platform yet in order to celebrate the people, businesses and organisations whose valuable work often receives little or no recognition.

The first big change is that the Awards will become a spring event and so we’ll be starting the nominations process later. This means we can stage our annual ceremony at time when food production in Britain is gearing up, and a time of year when we provide you with a far more adventurous and exciting ceremony.
 
And that’s where the other big change comes in. Our venue for the Food & Farming Awards in May 2014 will be Colston Hall in Bristol. It’s a prestigious theatre in a city that reflects many of the exciting trends in food and drink underway in the UK, from inspirational community work to a vibrant hub for new and young businesses. Most of all, this venue will allow us to have the highest level of public participation ever seen in the history of the awards.

We’re also starting to plan a wide range of public events based around the BBC Food & Farming Awards, and across Bristol, that will allow us to celebrate, share and demonstrate stories of British food and farming.

In the next few months, through the Food Programme, our websites and other BBC output we’ll start to outline in more detail the plans we’re developing for the Awards and other events next May in Bristol, how this year’s nominations process will run and also explaining how you can get involved. We think it will be worth the wait.

Listen to 2012's Food and Farming Awards

The Food Programme

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 a time when agricultural and rural issues dominated the programme, now they think it's all about sex. As evidence they point to Lillian's flirtation with Paul, and Pip spending the night with Jude, a much older man. Then there is Helen's attempts to become pregnant using donor insemination.

Mind you many of us feel that sort of thing pales in comparison with the steam that came from Jolene's shower a few years back. Feedback receives constant correspondence about the Archers so this week, partly to escape the constant election coverage of which many listeners have tired, I travelled to Ambridge with a panel of listeners to talk to the editor of the programme, Vanessa Whitburn.

I had a quick coffee in the Ambridge village hall beforehand with Linda Snell, to catch up on the latest gossip, and then went to the BBC's Birmingham studios where I met listeners Rhys Phillips from Cardiff and Siobhan Pitel from London. We were joined on the line from Radio Cumbria by Janet Mansfield and on the phone from the Cotswolds by smallholder Nell O'Connor.

Next week is the last Feedback of the present series and in it a panel of listeners will be reviewing the BBC's election coverage with some of those responsible for it. If you want to be part of the panel please get in touch via the web site.

Happy Listening!

Roger Bolton presents Feedback on BBC Radio 4

• Listen again, get in touch with the programme, find out how to join Feedback's listener panel or subscribe to the podcast on the Feedback web page.
• The Archers is on-air six days per week, at 1400 and 1900 weekdays and 1000 (omnibus) and 1900 Sunday. The Archers web site has lots of useful information, including, at the moment, a poll about Helen's donor insemination plans and a link to the thriving Archers messageboards.
• The Radio 4 blog spent a week with the Archers at the end of last year. Read the blog posts from Archers Week here. There are some photographs from behind the scenes too.
• The photograph is from the BBC's picture library. The caption reads: "Robert Mawdesley as Walter Gabriel giving Harry Oakes as Dan Archer his opinion on the cow entered for the Borchester Show."

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 arrived at the much hyped moorland in order that Aunty and her team of thousands of workers would produce gold standard heather honey.

However, the cold, foggy rainy day which greeted us in Derbyshire was not the idyllic scene I had been expecting. As we unloaded the Farming Today bees from the trailer our trousers became heavy with rain, our feet started squeaking and large drips of water were rolling down the backs of our necks.

It had taken 2 hours to drive there, but 10 minutes after arriving and unceremoniously dumping the Farming Today hive near the soaked heather, we were on our way back. Praying that the weather would be kind to our bees and, at the very least, they wouldn't starve.

In September we brought the bees back. They didn't starve. Quite the contrary it appears... Now it was time to harvest it.

Heather honey extraction is not easy. Other types of honey are spun out of the frame in a centrifuge. Heather honey is thicker and no amount of spinning will get it to shift. Instead, it is pressed out using a converted wine press. 40 tonnes of pressure are put on a stack of honeycomb filled with heather honey. The pressure makes the honey runny and it trickles out into a bucket.

For me, honey extraction is the worst part of beekeeping. It's sticky, it takes an age and the cleaning up afterwards would test the patience of a saint. It took 2 hours to extract the honey our bees had produced. It would take another 2 hours to clear up. Add that to the time taken travelling to the moor and back... heather honey production is not for the faint-hearted.

However, Aunty and her gang had done Farming Today proud. They'd produced 30lbs of the stuff. For those who haven't ever tried heather honey, spread thinly. It's not like other honey which can be eaten by the spoonful. It has a strong taste. Chris and I are ashamed to say that when we first tasted it at our evening classes last March we wrinkled our noses in disgust.

We would both now agree that the hard work that bees and beekeepers put into producing the seasonal crop of heather honey produces a sublime product. The consistency of liquid fudge and the taste of... well, you'll have to try some. But when you do bit into a piece of toast smeared with heather honey do think of the work the bees have put in to produce it, and of the lengths the beekeeper has gone to to bring it to your kitchen.

Fran Barnes is a producer on Farming Today

• Readers of the blog are very interested in bees. The Farming Today Bees category is the most popular on the Radio 4 blog.
• Farming Today is on Radio 4 Monday - Friday at 0545 and on Saturday morning at 0630. You can listen again online, of course, and there's a podcast.
• The picture shows the machine used by Fran to extract the Farming Today heather honey.

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.

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 which has greatly aggravated SF's founder Carlo Petrini. The result is UK Slow Food has a new chief exec, American-Italian dynamo Catherine Gazzoli, hot from the UN, ready to do some shaking up and convince us class-ridden, good-food-wary Brits that food matters. I think Catherine could easily outperform Tony Blair in the Middle East, but changing the food culture of the British Isles is an altogether harder task.

Lots of compliments at the meeting about our Food & Film programme two Sundays ago. The food world is a bit like the entertainment industry - you were wonderful darling - so I don't take compliments too seriously, but that was a programme I'm particularly proud to have presented. One of the Food Programme's brilliant producers understood that it would cast a new light on our food system if we looked at it just through the eyes of film makers, both here and abroad. We're living through a golden age of documentary making - documentaries that are being watched in cinemas, village and church halls all over the world (while fewer and fewer are appearing on our television screens. Something wrong somewhere).

Making the programme I interviewed Nick Francis, who with his brother Marc directed Black Gold, a documentary about the coffee business. I met them first with producer Rebecca Moore when The Food Programme went to Cancun to cover the World Trade Organisation meeting. Nick and Marc were there following the coffee story, documenting the relationship between developing countries and global decision-making on "free trade". The Cancun scenes in Black Gold are some of the most powerful in the whole film. Since the film was released in 2007 the issues it highlighted have taken over the brothers' lives.

And the film has been screened all over Africa and the Americas, spelling out for all to see a world where a cappuccino costs around £2.50 but the Ethiopian farmer who produced the beans - generally agreed to be the finest on the planet - will get perhaps 5p a kilo. And as the film tells us one kilo of coffee beans makes about 80 cups of coffee. The arithmetic isn't difficult. This is one of the reasons Ethiopian farmers and their families are going hungry, need food aid and are getting out of coffee growing. Insane? As we say at the Food Programme - understand food and you're a long way on the road to understanding the way the world works.

Meanwhile we're gearing up in this little corner of the open plan on the 6th floor at Broadcasting House for this year's Radio 4 Food & Farming Awards - the 10th. A decade since Prince Charles handed out the first gongs.

Gearing up seems the right expression... adjusting the criteria for each award, appointing the judging panel (Chair, Raymond Blanc, plus Alex James, Rose Prince, Mark Hix, Simon Parkes, Lord Haskins, for starters), constructing the trails for Radio 4, setting up the website to take in nominations, starting a filing system for each of the nine categories, getting the help of a smart young intern for a couple of weeks. And then wondering how the hell the producers are going to cope with organising the judging, and recording, with at least one judge, at each place, on each short-list - 24 sites in all and if other years are a guide they'll be scattered from the Orkneys to the Scillies--all the while continuing to turn out The Food Programme every week. Every year it seems overwhelming, every year it's exhaustingly fascinating.

Sheila Dillon is presenter of The Food Programme

• Make a nomination for the 2009 Food & Farming Awards.
• Some photographs of Sheila Dillon and producer Rebecca Moore in the studio on 23 July 2009.
• Paul Levy's blog post about the changes at Slow Food UK in The Guardian.
• The Financial Times reports on a plan by Ethiopian migrants to market Fair Trade coffee in the UK.
• The Guardian's special report on WTO Cancun.

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 showing signs of swarming for a few weeks - most notably by creating queen cells - as a swarming hive will need two queens: one to stay with the original colony and one for the departing bees. Fran, Clive (our bee mentor) and me have been destroying the cells, but they've been persistently returning. So Clive decided it was time to take more decisive action.

When I turned up at the hive that morning I was surprised to find Clive with a separate, empty hive just a few feet from the Farming Today hive. Over the next hour we proceeded to split the bees between the two hives, with Auntie (our original queen bee) in one, and some of the younger bees and a queen cell in the other. The theory is that because some of the bees have moved position, they'll think they've swarmed.

"Will it definitely work?" I asked Clive.

"No," he replied.

A couple of weeks on though I can report our bees are still in the hives, so all's looking promising, and we're hopeful that soon we'll be jarring up honey.

Incidentally Fran and I had a great time at the Royal Show. In between making Farming Today programmes we spent time at the BBKA tent - including giving a couple of demonstrations under Clive's watchful eye. Our honey and honey cake failed to win any prizes. We were all disappointed but took solace in some honey ice cream. Thanks to all the Farming Today listeners who came up and spoke to us.

Our bees are going on holiday to Derbyshire soon - more to follow.

• All the posts about the Farming Today Bees from the Radio 4 blog.
• Ian Douglas in the Telegraph is keeping his own beekeeping diary. Here's the latest entry.
• Picture, No Exit Sign, by Chris Campbell. Used under licence.

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 appeals to you:

"I could really do with some pointers from people who have made this cake before! Is the oven too hot? in a fan oven does it matter which shelf it goes on? should I use a less runny honey? And in less than a month can I produce a cake I won't be ashamed to take to the Royal? Help?"

I am, though I say it myself, quite good at cakes. Both making and eating them. So when our producer Fran wafted back into the office from her latest foray to the Farming Today beehive, and informed us that the Royal Show has a honey cake competition, and we should enter, I volunteered without too much thought.

Mistake.

I have never made a honey cake. I assumed it was something like a sponge with less sugar and some honey. It isn't. It has lots of ingredients, and seems to require an attention to detail that doesn't come naturally to me.

Still, practice makes perfect and all that, so I embarked with some confidence on Honey Cake 1. I haven't got any of the Farming Today honey yet (there is already a queue and when I tried to jump it by mentioning my cake duties I got short shrift) so I am using some runny Yorkshire honey I got the other week at the Duncombe Park show. I needed 225g. Have you ever tried weighing honey? Its messy and sticky and doesn't come off clothes all that easily. Anyway, creamed that with the butter OK... Well actually it was margarine... added eggs, sieved the flour... Feeling a bit smug by this stage... shoved in the currants, sultanas, mixed peel, nutmeg and salt. Looked convincing, so put it into a cake tin. At this point I realised I hadn't put the oven on. I read the recipie, it calls for a 'moderate oven'. Arrghhh. Whats a moderate oven? So I go upstairs, log onto computer, Google Delia Smith - of course she knows - so I charge back downstairs to set the oven to 170 degrees C... Wait for it to heat up... Put cake in. Sit back and wait to taste my triumph.

I am not sure what happened next. I can't blame the family, as the kids were in bed and my husband at work... But somehow I forgot all about the cake. I only remembered when a singed smell spread through the house.

The 'cake' was more a burnt biscuit. It hadn't risen much at all, and was almost on fire when I rescued it from the oven. There is no photo. I am too cross.

So Honey Cake 1 went in the bin. Tonight I am attempting honey cake 2, having invested in an apron, a smaller cake tin, some butter and worked out how to set the alarm on my mobile phone. What can possibly go wrong?

• James Martin's recipe for honey cake from the BBC Food site.
• All the posts about the Farming Today bees from the Radio 4 blog.
• Charlotte Smith's profile on the Radio 4 web site.
• More pictures of Charlotte's second effort at honey cake.

The Farming Today bees are getting their own blog over on the Farming Today web site. While they're finishing off the design, Chris Impey and Fran Barnes, producers and trainee beekeepers, bring us news from the hive:

When Fran and I started this project we thought it would be an age before we started on the honey-making process - and that we'd be lucky to get a single jar in our first year. But if all goes well, our mentor Clive has assured us, we'll soon be rolling in the sticky stuff.

We've now put a 'super' on our hive. This is essentially a second storey on top of a mesh which allows the workers through but not the queen with her larger body. It means the honeycomb cells are only filled with honey - and not brood. When I checked after two days of it being on there was already some honey in there - but only enough for a teaspoon.

When we'll be able to start collecting honey depends on the weather. It's turned a bit cooler and wetter meaning the bees will be doing less foraging - so they'll be collecting less and feeding more off the current reserves.

One of the best parts of our evening classes was learning about the different types of honey, and that it's what the bees forage on which influences the taste. Honey from heather for example (very strong) tastes markedly different to honey from flowers (very delicate). Ours likely to come from a variety of flowers, trees and crops, and Clive says this will make it taste what he describes as a typically English honey.

The endemic nature of the disease varroa means it's very likely our bees already have it. Fran's off this week to do some work with Clive to monitor for it. There should be something on that on the programme soon.

And our suits are beginning to look and smell like the real deal. No longer pristine white, they're now covered in bee poo. And they stink of smoke.

Fran Barnes adds:

It's official, we have 'swarmy' bees. I've just been to the hive with our mentor, Clive Joyce. Only to discover in the 7 days of rain we've had the bees have been very busy. Unfortunately their efforts have not been directed into the honey-making deparment (it being too wet for them to fly mostly) but, instead, they have been making many Queen cups.

This is not good news. Queen cups are the spherical cells which a new Queen grows in. For the uninitiated (which included me up to a couple of weeks ago), the worker bees occasionally decide they want a new Queen (or 10 in our case). They then create big round cells which the current Queen lays an egg in. The workers then fill this with Royal Jelly to create a very large, fully formed bee - a Queen.

We really don't want more than one Queen in a hive as the bees will swarm off with the old Queen to create a new colony. When that happens the chances of getting any honey are remote. We 'dealt with' the Queen cells and will have to be very vigilant over the next few months. We're slightly mystified why they're doing this, usually bees only produce extra Queens and swarm when they run out of room. The Farming Today hive is still as spacious as a New York loft apartment.

If the bees do swarm and take our current Queen with them this would be very annoying, particularly as we've only just named her. She's called "Auntie" - thanks to all your suggestions - from the intellectual, to the surreal (Kenneth?). We need to keep Auntie happy in her hive.

While there, Clive also put in a varroa floor. This will enable us to count the dead varroa mite which fall through the holes of the new floor onto a piece of white cardboard. Any more than 6 a day is a problem apparently. Watch this space next week. Would love to hear your comments about swarmy bees and your efforts to control varroa mite. Anyone harvested any honey yet?

• Previous posts about the The Farming Today bees are here (27 April) and here (1 May).
• The Farming Today web site.
• Picture of a European Honey Been touching down by Autan (used under licence).

Fran Barnes is a producer at Farming Today

Fran Barnes, a producer on the programme and half of the intrepid bee team, has sent me a second installment in the Farming Today bee saga. I'm posting it on her behalf this time but she'll contribute directly in future and the programme team are planning a blog of their own:

"Just taken Charlotte Smith to the hive to record Farming Today This Week for broadcast Saturday 2nd May. Charlotte is pessimistic about our bees and raised serious questions about whether they would survive the year, given the disease problems the British honeybee faces.

This was a shock to me. I've always been perfectly optimistic. It hasn't really occurred to me that our colony could die (read about bee parasite Varroa in Wikipedia and hear more about it on last Tuesday's Farming Today). I had just assumed that was the kind of thing that happened to 'other' beekeepers. Should I start bracing myself for this possibility? Seeing our (still nameless) Queen working hard in the hive it's hard to believe at this stage anything untoward could happen. The Queen's laying 1800 eggs a day and the hive is looking very busy. The bees are starting to 'draw out' the comb from the new frames in the hive. I'm always so fascinated and taken aback by the industriousness of the bees that important questions like "when will we get some honey" didn't cross my mind. I must ask Clive next time.

On the subject of honey... Chris and I attended the most well-received of our beekeeping evening classes last night. It was the session about honey extraction and we sampled 5 different types of honey as well as honey cake and mead. We decided that honey tasting is very similar to wine tasting - if you're used to cheap plonk then expensive stuff doesn't quite taste right. We're both slightly embarrassed to admit that neither one of us particularly liked heather honey - the gold standard of honey. We had thought we'd take the Farming Today bees 'to the heather' this year, but perhaps not.

On another note, while at the apiary I re-hived a swarm Clive had collected. There's so much to learn, and the more we learn the more intrigued we are. More on the swarm next week."

Fran Barnes

• Chris Impey's introduction to the Farming Today bees on the blog last week.
• Listen again to the bees' on-air debut on Farming Today last week.

Chris Impey and Fran Barnes from Farming Today have been learning the art of beekeeping for a year-long project. They've acquired a hive and a colony of bees, which they're keeping at the British Beekeepers' Association apiary at the National Agricultural Centre in Warwickshire. They're going to see if they can keep the colony alive for long enough to produce a crop of honey. They're going to be visiting the hive regularly during the year and will be blogging about it too. Here, Chris Impey introduces the project.

So after five weeks of evening classes Fran and I have finally taken delivery of the Farming Today bees - the first time we've done any bee handling. Under the watchful eye of our tutor, Clive Joyce, we went from being beekeeping students to actual beekeepers - albeit inexperienced ones.

It was amazing to see how quickly they took to their new home. Within a few minutes one bee had taken up guard at the hive entrance while others were coming back and forth as if they'd been living there for weeks. I can't wait to see how they develop. There are 10,000 of them at the moment but that's likely to go up to 50,000 by the summer.

I was surprised to learn that even though our colony is new (it's been supplied by a local breeder) it's very likely it's already got varroa. One of our biggest challenges over the coming months will be to monitor for the disease which devastated so many colonies last year.

We had evening class again last night - the lecture was about how to handle bees so we felt at an advantage over the rest of the group. Fran was showing off the skill she learned from Clive in properly "turning" a frame laden with bees. People must think we're swots because we always sit at the front.

We can't decide what to call our queen. Fran suggested either Charlotte or Anna after our presenters. Any suggestions welcome.

• The slideshow shows Chris and Fran's first visit to the hive
• Listen to Chris and Fran's first visit to the new hive on this morning's Farming Today.


• Fran and Chris have been trained by the Warwick and Leamington branch of the British Beekeepers Association.


• Some photographs of Chris and Fran at the new hive, taken by Clive Joyce, their bee mentor.