A Window on Autumn Countryfile Summer Diaries

All this week, we're bringing you the top Countryfile stories

that define our British summer.

The team has been travelling the length and breadth of the UK... Wow!

..discovering the seasonal stories that affect you.

My goodness me! What's that?

It's a bad day if these are falling out of the sky.

Whoa!

How old is she?

I have to admit, I was expecting to see armed guards

considering you are growing a drug.

Hey presto! The best slug trap in the world.

This is Countryfile Summer Diaries.

And here's what we've got for you on today's programme -

Margherita's in a top-secret location on the hunt

for one of the world's most expensive and elusive foods...

And how long did this tree take to give you that first harvest?

This took six years. A six-year wait for a harvest.

That seems quite a while.

..and conservationist Roy Taylor will be giving us the lowdown on

plants that are officially bad for your health and the environment.

Beautiful though it may be,

this is one of the most dangerous plants in Great Britain and once it

starts taking over, drastic measures need to be taken to stop it.

And find out why these tiny eggs from the latest addition to our

smallholding can make you a pretty penny in your local restaurant.

We've been here all week on the Gower peninsula in south Wales.

As well as being outstandingly beautiful, it's a place that

is also still traditionally farmed with livestock and crops.

And summer is a particularly crucial time for arable farmers here,

harvesting the fruits of their labour.

But countrywide, 50,000 hectares of farmland have been devoted

to another very British vegetable - the pea.

On average, we eat around 77 million kilos of them every year and

harvesting them is like a military operation, as Keeley now reports.

This summer, two billion portions of peas will be harvested in Britain.

That's 45,000 tonnes.

And to put that into some kind of perspective,

if we lined up all the little peas side-by-side,

it would wrap around the world 24 times.

In each handful of these perfect little pearls,

you'll find more vitamin C than you would in two apples.

They're jam-packed with nutrients and protein and their sweet

flavour makes them one of Britain's favourite veggies.

But the second that you pick and pop a pod,

the goodness begins to fade, so farmers have to get it

from the field to the freezer in just 150 minutes.

It's a military operation.

Farmers line up on the starting blocks like Formula One drivers

ready to go on the sound of the starting pistol.

But the final go-ahead belongs to professionally-trained fieldsmen.

Men like Anthony Kitchen.

So, for Anthony, the burning question...

Do you actually like peas?

I absolutely love peas. Right!

You'd need to really, wouldn't you? I eat them every day in the harvest.

I eat them every day at home and I have them in any form or shape

you can give me them in terms of food mixes.

So, Anthony, you're in this field this morning to make a decision

as to whether it can be harvested. What are you looking for?

I'm looking for the very soft, tender ball,

the really squashy, very full of juice, soft, small peas

which is exactly what we want for our products.

And what do you look for in the field in your hands?

I'm looking for the perfect peas. Let's have a look, then.

So, what exactly are you looking at? Pop them open.

I want to see these touching in the pod. The inside is quite structured.

They're quite tough inside, but they're still full of juice.

And you actually eat them. OK. Try them...

Mm! What do you think? Sweet? Perfect.

You should find them very sweet... Mm!

Very tender and soft.

It's an anxious wait to find out if these peas are perfect to pick.

And we're on!

MUSIC: Ride Of The Valkyries by Richard Wagner

Why is there such a rush?

Once the pod is open, the level of vitamins,

the level of sugar, starts falling fast and the optimum time

for that deterioration is about 150 minutes.

There's just a 150-minute window from the second the pod is picked

until the peas are processed and frozen.

So, the clock is ticking.

To maximise efficiency, the picking process is completely automated.

These mammoth-sized machines pick and split the pods, keeping hold of

the precious pea cargo and leaving a trail of shredded waste behind.

Despite their size, these harvesters are a "peas" of cake to drive,

controlled entirely by GPS.

It's that easy, you can drive it. Really?

Yeah, off we go. OK.

Swap over and go. Yeah. And it'll steer itself.

So, you don't touch it? No, not at all now.

How am I doing, then? You're doing very well. Yeah?

Could be a pea farmer?

Yeah, I'll get out and go for a drink! Please don't!

LAUGHTER

20 minutes gone and we are ready to unload, but there's no time to stop.

It all happens on the move.

After an anxious 30-minute drive, the peas arrive at the factory

where they are processed as quickly as possible.

We're now 125 minutes in and the peas have only just gone in

the processing plant.

It should take 20 minutes from beginning to end

to process the peas, so, providing there aren't any glitches,

we should be done with a whole five minutes to spare.

I just hope there haven't been too many "esca-peas"!

Each pea follows the same path through the plant where

they are graded, washed and blanched.

The final freezing process

takes the temperature down to minus 25 degrees.

The clock is stopped with minutes to spare,

but there's still one key question.

How do they taste?

Amy Dawson's in charge of quality control and that means

it's her job to eat...

Well, a lot of peas.

How many do you eat a day?

I eat 16 plates of peas three times a day,

so I eat 16 plates of peas for breakfast in the morning.

Don't you get sick of peas? Never sick of peas.

I even eat them when I get home of an evening. Really?

I certainly do, yes. I'm surprised you're not glowing green!

So, Amy, when you come in here to check the peas,

what are you looking for? What makes the perfect pea?

So, a perfect pea... We like a nice even green.

So you're looking for consistency of the colour green.

You're looking for a pea which is lovely in flavour,

nice and sweet, the skin mustn't be too hard or too soft. OK.

Why don't we try some? OK.

Mm! Now...

I'm not an expert, but they do taste nice. They are perfect. Yeah?

Perfect peas. And do some peas not make the grade?

It happens very rarely.

Once the peas are beyond 150 minutes, the klaxon goes off and the

peas go into another pallet so they can't make it into our products.

So, Amy, I suppose there's only one important question left and that's

are you "ha-pea" with the peas we picked this morning?

I'm certainly happy.

So, this summer, spare a thought for the frantic pea farmers

racing against the clock to make sure Britain's famous little

veggie tastes absolutely "pea-fect".

Now, summer isn't just good for harvesting, it's also the perfect

time of year to see some of our most charismatic marine life.

Just three summers ago, I couldn't resist heading to the North Sea,

off the Northumberland coast, to take it all in.

Today, I'm going in search of a creature out there whose life

we know very little about.

Underwater cameraman Ben Burville is at the start of a five-year

project to learn more about the life of this elusive mammal.

What are the chances of seeing this creature?

With nature, you never know, John. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed.

Our high-speed rig will take us far out to sea

to an area where they've been spotted in the past.

So, what exactly is it that we're looking for?

Well, what we're looking for today, John, is this -

a white beaked dolphin.

The most abundant dolphin in the North Sea with about 8,000-10,000

of them in there, but one that very few people know much about.

Why is that?

It's really the fact that it tends to be in deeper waters and

tends to be offshore.

Is it important, do you think, to find out more about these dolphins?

It is important for their conservation and also to find

out whether activities that we do can affect them in an adverse way.

We're passing close to the Farne Islands so I want to make

a short stop to catch up on an important project there.

For just a little while, our quest for white beaked dolphins

is put on hold.

Ciaran, good to see you. Graham.

Welcome to the Farne Islands. Thank you very much. Nice to be back.

Lovely weather at the moment, isn't it?

I was here right at the start of a crucial puffin count.

Let's hope your egg is... Oh! Ha!

Let's hope your egg hatches OK this year. Indeed. Good luck!

What the count showed is that puffin numbers had collapsed.

Ornithologists were fearful for the future.

Five years on, was the picture any better for the puffins?

In 2008, the population had declined by about

a third from the last census.

Also, this winter, it was a very, very tough winter.

It was a cold winter,

a lot of onshore winds and we had a big puffin wreck.

What do you mean by wreck there?

So, a puffin wreck basically involves birds washing up on the coast.

So, people were finding birds all along the north-east coast

from northern Scotland down to Yorkshire.

There were about 3,500 birds involved.

That sounds a lot and it was the biggest wreck for about 60 years.

All dead? All dead. So, what about this year's census, then?

This year's census is good news.

We've gone up to around 8% on top of what we had

to around 40,000 pairs of puffins on these islands.

The census may be over,

but work goes on to discover more about these colourful birds.

You're a brave man, Graham.

I've done that once and I got a very nasty bite.

They are pretty vicious.

I hope it's a chick. I've got a bit of a nibble.

It feels like a chick, so I'll just bring it out now.

You've got a few hundred of these to do?

Indeed. A few hundred.

A few hundred bites and scratches.

So here he is. And there we are. Little fellow here.

How old will that chick be? Ah, he's probably around the 35 days' mark.

He's pretty much ready to fledge.

He's got his head pretty much clear of any down whatsoever.

Just a little few tufts left here.

So now you're going to put a ring on him? We are indeed.

So we'll get a ring and hopefully we'll get some good data.

And what information do you hope to get from the ringing?

The basic thing you can learn is how long they're living for.

So, if this bird comes back in future years and we re-catch it,

we know when it was ringed, we know the exact ring number,

so it's got its own identity, and we know exactly how old it is.

Pop him back in again. Back in the hole and he'll be happy as Larry.

And he'll hopefully be out in a few days

and head out into the Atlantic Ocean.

And when will he come back again?

Maybe in around about four years' time usually

to get mature and start breeding for their first time.

But, until then, he'll just be floating around.

So, it's nice to know there's good news for the puffins here -

photogenic, approachable little birds, whose numbers are on the up.

Later in the programme, we continue our quest to capture on camera

the elusive white-beaked dolphin

for the first time on British television.

During our Spring Diaries, we met conservationist Roy Taylor

in East Yorkshire, where he showed us the result of his campaign to

make the countryside more accessible for people with disabilities.

I get so much pleasure from this.

I find it inconceivable that other people wouldn't enjoy it.

Now Roy's gone back to where his passion for wildlife began, to report

on a battle that's being waged against some countryside invaders.

This might be one of the most striking-looking flowers

you'll see in the summer.

But there's a sinister side hiding beneath its beauty.

It's taken over our countryside.

This is probably my favourite place in Britain.

This is Woolston Eyes Nature Reserve near Cheshire.

I've been a keen birder since I was a boy.

I first started coming to Woolston with my dad over 40 years ago,

and it's those visits that sparked a passion which has seen my love

of birds and wildlife turn into a career in the RSPB.

One of the great conservation success stories

of this remarkable wetland is the black-necked grebe.

It's got the most piercing of red eyes, and at this time of year

the male will be diving around,

popping up with lots of insect larvae.

And it's an incredibly rare bird -

less than 50 pairs in the United Kingdom,

of which a quarter of them breed on this wetland here.

Now, birds have been the central plank of my life

for as long as I can remember. Look at the view,

listen to the sounds of that black-headed gull colony.

When you immerse yourself in wildlife and in all these birds,

it's uplifting.

So this site is incredibly important to me,

but it's incredibly important to a lot of other people as well.

But all of this is under threat by an invasion of non-native plants,

which threaten to wipe out some of our native species.

Brian's a member of the Woolston Eyes Conservation Group.

He's taking me to see an infestation of a plant that can grow

up to six metres in height and it spreads like wildfire.

Wow, Brian. That's a lot of giant hogweed.

It's like a forest of triffids. How much of the reserve is it covering?

It is, Roy. It covers acres and acres of the reserve.

And it's an increasingly invasive species.

Each plant has got about 1,000 seeds

and there's thousands and thousands of plants.

The Victorians imported giant hogweed as a garden ornamental,

but the dainty white flowers give a false impression.

This plant is poisonous to touch.

If you touch it with your bare skin, you break out in blisters,

which can be very serious,

and people have been taken to hospital because of it.

So, from a conservation perspective, Brian, what's the problem?

Well, the problem is that it grows so tall and so dense

that all the undergrowth is shaded out completely.

So it's virtually a monoculture of giant hogweed.

All the native species get removed

and it's just a dead area, basically.

How would you normally treat this plant, then?

We can bulldoze the whole area, trash it and then flood it.

So when we come back here next year,

this is going to be a wetland full of black-necked grebes?

Indeed, that's exactly what we are hoping to achieve.

We're hoping to create a really worthwhile nature reserve.

But this is not the only invasive species here.

The reserve has another invader advancing into its wetlands.

This is the Himalayan balsam. And this individual's only a tiddler.

They grow much bigger than this.

Now, this plant comes from the Himalayas.

It was introduced to Great Britain in the 1830s.

And the idea was that the ordinary people

could afford to buy a packet of seeds,

and growing these plans would rival the rare orchids owned by the rich.

Fantastic for bees. Incredibly great pollen for bees.

But that's not the problem.

The problem is this plant grows so rapidly, it's so dense,

it literally shades out our native flora.

Warden John Langley is trying to tackle the problem.

Hi, John. Hi, Roy. So, how bad's the problem here?

Well, it's pretty bad.

We've got this Himalayan balsam all round the wetland site here.

It's a really simple plant to pull up.

It's got a small root system on it. Can I give you a hand? Yeah, sure.

Fantastic. I've got some gloves here. Let's get stuck in, then.

What do you do when you've pulled it, John?

Normally when we pull it, we snap it. Snap it at the base?

Snap it at the base and then put it in the pile.

We've cleared a fair amount of the stuff.

Mainly, we're concentrating around the reed bed area, where it has

the biggest detrimental effect on the breeding black-necked grebes

that we have on the site. OK.

At the moment, we're pretty much just holding the line and just

stopping that advancement into the reed bed, and then hopefully

this time next year there'll be a lot less.

The battle against Himalayan balsam isn't unique to Woolston Eyes.

This plant is right across the country.

Now, it might be foolish to think we can eradicate it entirely,

but what we can do is get rid of it from our most special places,

from our nature reserves.

And it's the hard work and sweat which will achieve that.

You can see that going on behind me now.

So my plea to you is become a conservation volunteer.

Go down to your local nature reserve and, bit by bit,

let's get rid of this balsam.

Now, yesterday, we saw Paul collect a dozen quail

to raise on his Wiltshire smallholding.

And today, he's going to show us how to make them earn their keep.

Earlier this summer, I took on a healthy covey of quail.

Oh, he's laid an egg! He's laid an egg!

That's our first quail egg, Dylan.

The tiny but tasty eggs from these birds are incredibly sought-after,

so I'm going to show you how you can make them pay their way.

Now, since they've arrived, we've had to move the quails

into the field with the sheep and rig up an electric fence

because we've spotted a fox in the garden on two occasions.

It's a little bit too enclosed.

Do you know, they've been absolutely no problem since they've arrived.

It's basically just like looking after chickens.

Make sure they're shut in the night box every single night,

they've got plenty of food and water,

and let them out in the morning.

And take a look at this!

Quails' eggs are the smallest commercially produced poultry eggs.

Now, they're a quarter of the size of a chicken egg,

yet nutritionally they're four times greater.

There's only one today.

Gram for gram, quail eggs have three times more B vitamins

and five times more protein and potassium.

But they're not the easiest things to cook - or crack!

How do you do it? Do you know?

It's a mess, isn't it?

Let's try that again.

Oh! I can't do it, I don't know how to do it.

Their daintiness makes cooking with these eggs tricky.

And that's another reason why trendy restaurants love them.

Well, naturally I'm keen to find out what the experts make of my eggs.

Hopefully there's a market for them.

Top chef Peter Vaughan runs The Bistro down the road,

and also owns a local cookery school -

the perfect place for me to learn

how to cook with these delicate eggs.

Hi, Peter. Hello, Paul. Good to see you.

You're the man I need to speak to. Are these your quails' eggs?

They are. I've ruined five, trying to learn how to crack them open.

They're very delicate, aren't they, quails? But they're fresh. Yeah.

I think we should do some lessons on cooking classic quails' eggs.

So why don't you get an apron, wash your hands,

I'll put a frying pan on.

First off, how to improve my egg cracking skills.

With the knife, it's just a little click

and then rub the knife through.

It's like a saw mark? Just like a saw mark.

And drop it down. Isn't that beautiful?

Have a go yourself. A little tap. That's it.

And then just crack the egg in gently

and close to the pan.

Look at that. Wow! How easy was that?!

Next, hard-boiled eggs.

You want to take something like a little sieve like that,

and then for two minutes you'll get a nice soft-boiled egg,

and if you want it hard-boiled, no more than four minutes.

Three to four minutes.

Can I have a go? Absolutely. Off you go.

Yeah, nice and gently. Perfect. They're absolutely delicious.

The interesting thing is

in other countries, like Asia and the Caribbean,

they eat these, like, every day.

Because the birds are more frequently out there.

Absolutely. But they're very tasty.

They're much more tasty than a hen's egg,

even a good-quality hen's egg, and the yolks are much bigger.

So they are nutritional beauties.

I've always thought they were the height, you know, of luxury, really.

Up there with caviar!

Traditionally served with caviar in Russia and a bit of sour cream.

Yeah, it can be an expensive meal. Doesn't have to be.

Well, we're nearly there, aren't we? Yeah, we're just about there.

If we just take those out

and into water, about 30 seconds.

So that's a good tip, out of the boiling water, into cold water.

Straightaway. It goes for all eggs.

Is there anything else you can teach me, any recipes?

Oh, there's infinite ways you can serve quails' eggs.

I shall teach you many different ways. Please, yeah.

One of Peter's favourite quail recipes

is a classic Filipino street dish.

They basically have crispy quails eggs and they call it kwek-kwek.

I'll go for one of those.

I'll go quackers for that.

That's just plain seasoned flour, OK? Yeah.

You can do this gluten-free as well. Yeah.

And then drop that into some egg wash.

That's just some beaten eggs, OK?

A little tip is keep one hand wet

and one-hand dry, OK?

So my dry hand into some breadcrumbs.

So I'm going to start frying those.

If you want to have a go at paneing, OK?

And then they literally just cook in about sort of 30 seconds.

That's a really quick fry.

Just to get outside nice and crispy.

You'd serve it with a dip.

I've done you a little tomato dip.

It could be anything you like.

This is very good.

That is delicious. Do you like them? That is delicious.

So simple, aren't they?

So, how much will I get for a dozen quail eggs on a regular basis?

Yeah, about between ?2-?3... OK.

..is a good price for really good quality. Absolutely.

And there really aren't many producers doing what I would call

artisan quail's eggs so we are really interested.

Can we supply you regularly? Oh!

It's a deal. How much? ?3.

Brilliant. Done. Yes!

Considering there's no middleman,

that's not a bad price for your quail eggs

especially when you think

that the average poultry farmer gets just six pence per chicken egg.

I'll be getting 25p each for these quail eggs.

Now that I've got my first repeat customer, I'll need to expand

our quail empire and, for that, I'll have to rear my own chicks.

And here's the last one.

There we go. Look at that.

It's incredible to think that after 17 days in an incubator,

a fertilised egg will hatch into one of these tiny, little things.

I'll send her to sleep cos my hands are so warm.

And they just need a brood box. That's all they need.

We got an old hamster cage which will do.

We've cleaned it out, put some sawdust in it

and you're the last one to go in. There you go, girl.

Look at that.

Absolutely incredible.

Also we've got a heat lamp just to keep them warm

but they won't stay chicks for long.

After six weeks, they'll be egg-laying adults themselves

and now I know how to cook the eggs.

I'm off the coast of Northumberland with Ben Burville.

Ben's a GP by day

but away from the surgery, he's an underwater cameraman.

We're in search of one of the North Sea's best kept secrets -

white-beaked dolphins.

We head further out into the North Sea to continue our search.

Why have we stopped, Ben? Because nobody's seen a dolphin or anything.

No, no, we just stopped because there's quite

a few puffins over there in the water.

Is that a sign that maybe there are dolphins around?

It's a sign there may be food in the water. Big sand eels or...

And there could be dolphins. And there could be dolphins there as well, yeah.

To use an old landlubber saying,

it's like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Now we're rendezvousing with Newcastle University's

marine research ship, the Princess Royal.

Today, Ben is working alongside Simon Laing,

whose team is hoping to find out what effect the construction of

wind farms at sea has on dolphins.

Simon is using sound, not pictures.

What have we got here, then, Simon? This is a towed hydrophone.

So it's a special type of microphone that listens... Microphone? Yeah.

I've seen lots of microphones in my time

but never one that looked like this.

Yeah, this is a special microphone that listens for sounds underwater.

But the really clever part is in here.

Now the microphone's in the water, we can come over to the computer

and, as soon as we press record, what we'll start to see is some of

the sounds that we're hearing right now popping up on the screen.

That's background noise that you're seeing on-screen.

What sort of symbol would you see if it was a white-beaked dolphin?

Well, we would hopefully see a red triangle popping up on screen

and that would mean we're recording something in real time

and it would be about 200 metres behind the vessel.

Can you actually hear the sound of the dolphins?

Well, dolphins make two types of sounds.

They make whistles and they make clicks.

We can hear the whistles but we can't hear the clicks.

In fact, I've got a recording here of some white-beaked dolphin

whistles if you'd like to have a listen.

DOLPHIN WHISTLING

That really as a whistle, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.

One of the things we're trying to determine with this project,

do the dolphins in the north-east of England

have a different whistle to those in Scotland?

Cos that would indicate those

two populations are very separate if that is the case.

What's the research telling you? That they might?

The research at the moment is

telling us they may well have different whistles, yeah.

So you could well have, in this bit of the North Sea, Geordie dolphins,

with a Geordie accent.

Potentially, yes, you could have Geordie dolphins in the north-east.

Whatever the accent, there's not a whistle right now from

the white-beaked dolphins so we're obviously in the wrong place.

I'm going to try my luck again with Ben.

There you go. Oh, done it. Whoops.

Ben reckons our best chance of seeing the dolphins

lies 18 miles out in the Farne Deeps,

where the sea floor will be around 100 metres below us.

That's equivalent to the height of St Paul's Cathedral.

We've arrived at our destination.

All we can do now is keep our eyes peeled and hope.

Oh, there we are. Look, straight there.

Yeah. 15 metres from us.

OK, here at the front of the boat. Over the front of the boat.

I see them there. Can you see it? There you are. Wow.

So this is a white-beaked dolphin and it's choosing to bow ride.

One, two, three, four, five,

six, seven, eight, nine. Wow.

Goodness me.

A beautiful sight, John. Isn't it an amazing sight?

And I can see their white beaks so clearly now.

What's incredible to me is that these wild creatures want to

come so close to our boat and just play around.

Now, it's illegal to disturb dolphins so Ben's been granted

a special licence to dive close to them.

This is a massive pod, isn't it? This is a big pod.

It's an aggregation here. Several pods, you think? Without a doubt.

All gathered together. Mixing, yeah. See what you find.

John, I am surrounded by dolphins.

What an experience.

When they're under the water, John,

they're using their echolocation and they're using clicks and whistles

and the whistles really are to communicate with each other.

The maximum we can hear is about 20 kilohertz and...

Here we go. I'm just going to have a quick look at that one. OK.

Quite amazing to see, isn't it? What did you get, then?

Without doubt, some identification of males and females.

What do you notice about their behaviour?

Their behaviour is that they're inquisitive.

There are amazing wildlife just off our shores here, you know?

And these dolphins... That we know so little about. So little about.

The information you gather underwater could be vital

for the future protection of these creatures.

It certainly could for the future protection of these creatures. Yes, John, you're right.

Well, it's been a real privilege spending some time here in

one of the deepest parts of the North Sea with these

wonderful creatures and now, thanks to the underwater footage

that Ben's being collecting, we should know a little bit more

about their, up till now, secret lives.

Well, now let's go from underwater to underground.

Margherita's been given special access to

a top-secret location in Leicestershire,

where she goes in search of a food

that's as elusive as it is expensive.

And it's been kept under a veil of secrecy for seven years

because this is the first farm in Britain to grow the delicacy

black truffle commercially and it's said to be worth its weight in gold.

Bringing the truffle back to the British countryside is

something Paul Thomas is particularly passionate about.

It's been an uphill battle for Paul.

We're looking for an investment of ?75,000.

Mycorrhizal Systems is a company based around the production

of black truffles.

But he managed to secure some pretty impressive backing...

If you're happy, it's a deal.

Yeah. Done.

..to fund his dream of cultivating the truffle under home soil.

Paul, great to see you. Hi there. Nice to see you.

12 years later, I've come to see how he's getting on.

Truffles used to grow over quite large swathes of England, really.

We used to have markets in the south-west.

Mrs Beeton wrote about them.

When we lost a lot of our natural woodland,

we lost a lot of our wild truffles

so, at the moment, there's not that much produced in the wild so we're

cultivating them to try and bring that industry back. And of course,

there's a financial incentive cos they're worth quite a bit of money.

But it's not a harvest for the faint-hearted.

Unlike more common crops that produce each year,

Paul has to wait longer, much longer,

before his fungus comes to fruition.

So, is this it? Is this the tree that gave you the first truffle?

Yeah, this is the tree which produced

Britain's first cultivated truffle.

I was digging around the base of the tree, just looking for roots

to sample, and then unexpectedly just hit this truffle.

Incredibly exciting day.

And how long did this tree take to give you that first harvest?

This took six years.

A six-year wait for a harvest, that seems quite a while. Yeah, but it...

I mean, once they're producing, they produce every year,

so it's worth it. But it is...

You've got to wait for the tree to mature,

for the fungus to mature, so it takes a good few years.

And how do you get trees to give you truffles?

Well, we start from a seed, and all these trees you see around you,

actually, are seeds that I've planted myself,

so we'd start from a seed, we clean them up,

we grow them in a very clean, sterile environment in the lab,

we culture up the truffle fungus,

and then we introduce them to each other.

And we get the fungus to bind with the root system of the tree.

And it covers the root system like a glove covering a hand,

and then we take that young plant, we plant it into the ground

in carefully controlled soil conditions, and then they grow up,

and six years later, produce wonderful truffles.

Sought after by some of the world's best chefs,

they're prized for their earthy taste and distinctive aroma.

And demand is on the rise,

even though they cost over ?400 per kilo.

Although traditionally harvested in the autumn months,

because of the milder climate,

English-grown summer truffles can be unearthed as early as June

without compromising their flavour or fragrance.

But finding truffles has always proved a little tricky.

Traditionally, pigs were used, as they're attracted to a chemical

released by the underground mushroom.

But they had a horrible habit of eating them.

For that reason, dogs are now

the truffle hunters' companion of choice.

This is Freddy.

Truffle hunting is new to him, and although he's been in training

for some time, today, the pressure is really on.

Let's hope Freddy can come up trumps with the truffles!

FREDDY SNIFFS

So, we've been out for a few minutes now. Freddy's off doing his thing.

What's he actually sniffing out?

Yeah, so Freddy's looking for, obviously, the truffle scent.

(Where's the truffles?) FREDDY SNIFFS

Freddy's got quite a difficult job,

because it's such a windy day that that scent column...

If you imagine, if you lit a candle and you blew it out,

that little plume of smoke,

if you imagine that going off with the wind,

that's kind of what's happening to the scent,

so it's really hard for Freddy to locate that, follow it,

and pinpoint where the truffle is.

And how will we know when he's found something?

He'll hopefully put his paw by it, and he will lie down,

so that's what we're waiting for.

He looks quite in the zone.

You know, he's concentrating, so that's good.

He's got his nose to the ground, and he's moving across,

looking for those scent columns.

He may have his nose to the ground, but right now...

BACKGROUND MUSIC SLOWS DOWN

I'm not so sure Freddy's head's in the game.

Philip, how's Freddy done?

I think he's had a great time, and certainly,

he was picking up some interesting smells.

I've no doubt that there's truffle activity going on.

You find them at the most unexpected times,

and when you're sure you're going to find one, you don't.

I guess that's why they're such a valuable harvest.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Quite mysterious, I guess.

Freddy might not have struck gold, but it looks like Paul may have

in his effort to bring the black truffle

back to Britain's forests.

It's amazing to think that this tiny little lump

goes for such high prices, but now,

having discovered what goes into nurturing,

cultivating and finding it,

I can truly appreciate why the truffle is known as

the black diamond of the kitchen.

BEES BUZZ

Nothing is more important to bees than pollen,

so how do they let the rest of the hive know

when they've found a really good supply?

Well, they do a waggle dance, of course!

And Ellie has been to a research project that's trying to decode it.

It may be a risky job, but it's a crucial one,

not just for the survival of the bees, but for humans too.

Bees are our most important pollinating insects.

75% of the world's staple crops rely on pollination by bees.

So research projects to understand

more about their foraging habits are essential.

The pollinating work they do is estimated to contribute

?26 billion worldwide.

That's why there's been so much concern

about the recent decline in global bee populations.

If we're going to reverse this trend,

first we need to understand more about exactly where bees feed.

The best way to do this is to get the bees themselves to tell us.

And to do this, Professor Ratnieks has devised a way of

eavesdropping on the way bees communicate with each other

in the hive.

What we're seeing is live action in a beehive.

What we're particularly interested in is the waggle dance,

or the dancing behaviour, and we've got some of that going on too,

because it's a lovely day today, and the bees are foraging.

The waggle dance is the bees' unique way of communicating

to each other where they can find the best source of pollen and nectar

that they need to make honey.

The amount of time that she spends waggling her body

gives the distance, and the angle of her body

while she does that gives the direction,

so that bee is pointing with her head

more or less down in this direction here.

Yes, OK, I can see that.

And that means that the food are this angle from the sun.

So it's really in the opposite direction to the sun.

The worker bees understand this language of the dance innately,

but for us to interpret its secrets,

hours of footage have to be carefully decoded.

That takes time,

but you can get a rule of thumb idea from the live dances.

What can you tell me about this bee?

Where is it pointing its head when it makes its waggle run?

Oh, it's pretty much straight up. Straight up.

In the direction of the sun, is it?

A little bit to the left of vertical.

A little bit to the left. So, sort of ten degrees, say?

And roughly how many seconds is it waggling its body for

before it breaks off? About two?

Yeah, maybe one or two seconds, so that's just done very roughly,

but we can already tell that the bee is telling the other bees

in the direction of the sun,

actually a bit to the left of the sun,

cos the bee is dancing a bit left of vertical,

and roughly 1 or 1.5km.

And this is something you can actually plot on a map over here?

We can plot it on a map, and we can go and look for it as well,

if we want. So if we go to the map, let's just see over here.

This is the university, marked with an X.

Now, if you put the protractor on there and get it lined up

so that the zero is pointing north, we know that at this time of day,

the sun is at a position of 166 degrees. OK.

And the bee was dancing a little bit to the left of vertical,

which means that we have to go a little bit left of the sun,

so this is the angle - roughly 146 degrees.

That is to the south-east.

What about distance? And distance...

Well, the distance was of approximately 1km,

and that's roughly here.

So what we need to be doing is taking this... very conveniently,

the bee is foraging in the direction that a road is leading.

We can take this road down, we can jump out of the car here,

we can walk along this footpath here,

and we can explore around and see what the bee might be foraging on.

So we can actually go to where the bee has been

pointing towards right now? That's fantastic.

So, taking a look at the map, we've got down here,

which is pretty much where we are now. Yes.

So, more accurately, where are we looking at for the bees?

Well, we marked a point here just by this place marked Loose Bottom,

and there it is over there,

and you can see a mass of white flowers and yellow flowers.

Half of that field seems to be full of flowers,

so I think we should check it out.

The bees have led us to what seems to be an ideal spot to find pollen.

So this is a field that a farmer grazes his animals in, and yet,

it's also a field which is good for nature, and, you know,

lots of flowers, lots of insects.

So this is a good example of where farming and wildlife

are kind of coexisting quite happily.

Hugh Passmore is already putting that theory into practice.

He sows his pasture with a mixture of wild flowers,

specifically to attract the bees.

So, Hugh, have you always farmed with half an eye on bees?

Yes, the family have always sort of farmed in a very traditional way.

We're a mixed farm. As you can see here, we've got grass crop,

we have clover and trefoil flowering in it. Oh, yeah.

Which is obviously very good for bees.

So, yeah, the bees are very important to us.

But in a way, we're also very important to them, you know,

for the pollen, nectar for them.

And does it increase your yields by making sure

you have bees on the land? Yeah, definitely.

They're pollinating the plants, so you're getting much better yields.

The Government are now providing incentives to encourage

other farmers to plant pollen and nectar mixes in their fields

as well as wild flowers at the edges,

and it's at one of these pollen-rich margins on Hugh's farm

that beekeeper Ray Chandler looks after his hives.

Hi, Ray. How's it all going? Oh, hi. Oh, very well.

The bees are doing extremely well this year.

I mean, it's an ideal position, of course, and they're doing...

They're responding to it. Excellent.

Why is this such a good place for your hives?

This farm has such a variety of forage for the bees,

but not all agricultural land is good.

That which is more intensively farmed than this

produce gluts of nectar when the crop is in bloom,

and then go for ages without any.

Here, because of that rich mix of natural,

wild and cultivated crops, there's a lot of different nectars

and pollen is available over a much extended period.

With both Professor Ratnieks' work and the government incentives,

steps are being made to ensure the decline in our bee population

is reversed, while simultaneously creating

a more diverse natural habitat for all kinds of other animals.

Well, that's just about it, I'm afraid.

It's time to close our Countryfile Summer Diaries,

from the Gower Peninsula.

It's been a spectacular place to explore the wonders of the season.

So, enjoy the rest of the summer,

and we hope that you'll be able to join us again

when we open our Autumn Diaries. Bye for now.

Join me, Patrick Kielty,

in a brand-new BBC Two quiz show, Debatable,

where a team of celebrities put their debating skills to the test