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Welcome to Grow Cook Eater Range, the podcasts of me, Sarah Raven, and a really fantastic merry crew of guests.

And today I am joined by Richard Rickett.

Now, Richard is just the most extraordinary expert on bees.

So particularly on honeybees, but actually the thing that I have found absolutely fascinating

in his just out book called beekeeping for gardeners is not so much about the beekeeping,

but for me it's about the wild bees. Because I'm not a

beekeeper, because Adam, my husband, is allergic to bees. And if he gets stung, we just don't quite

know what will happen. So we had to stop having honeybees in our garden, but we still have lots and

lots of wild bees. And I've just so enjoyed reading the

whole section on what we can do to help our wild solitary and bumblebees. And Richard seems to me

to be the great living expert in the UK. So welcome Richard. It's so nice to have you on the podcast.

Hi Sarah. Thanks. Lovely to be here.

Can you just tell us all a little bit about your background? So how you've come to just have this encyclopedic knowledge of not just honeybees, but all bees. Well, it's quite a long story.

I grew up in Surrey, but what I wanted to be more than anything was a farmer. I loved

farms, my best friend was a farmer and so on. And then the most miraculous thing happened, which was

when I was seven, my parents got the good life bug and we moved from Surrey to Somerset and they

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