Ellen McCallie's Colorado video diary: Mine

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So for this programme I got the beauty end. The bees, they were amazing, they were so docile, and to see what a group of insects can do when they work together, I mean the wax, the honey, the way they interact, and then also the way humans have learned to interact with them. We harvest our honey all the time and we really don’t upset them badly. No-one got stung so I really liked that part. And that was pretty much day one and day two I was dealing with bees, well dealing with bees or honey.

Collecting the wick, the plants for the wick, fabulous, easy, fun, but the science that really kind of rocked my head this time was the idea of flammable gas because the fact that you can contain a blaze really, I’d never really thought of that before. So that kind of spun my head a little bit and to get around, to get that, to feel comfortable with that took me a while. It was amazing to see.

And then Hermione’s thing, man! You know, you hear about radioactivity all the time but do you ever really see it? Hermione made a way that we could see radioactivity. We could see the ions moving from the rock into space, into our world, which I thought was really cool.

And then of course day three, what do you say? Jonathan does it again. He builds a machine that works, it can break, he can rebuild it by candlelight in the middle of a mine. Fabulous day. It was, I loved this programme.