Bee swarm in Alford? Help is a minute away.

Alford is a village and small market centre in Donside — the upper Don valley — some 25 miles west of Aberdeen, at the point where the valley widens into the flat Haughton plain below the Grampian foothills. The Grampian Transport Museum and the narrow-gauge Alford Valley Railway are the town's best-known attractions; the Haughton Country Park grounds and the Don riverside provide extensive public green space with lime, sycamore and riverside willows. Craigievar Castle (National Trust for Scotland) and its designed policies lie a few miles to the south, their veteran trees and walled gardens adding historic garden forage to the landscape. The upper Don valley farmland carries hawthorn and sycamore through May; the Correen Hills and Hill of Fare moorland above the valley contribute ling heather from late July. Oilseed rape is grown on the wider valley fields in spring.

Oilseed rape on the vast arable belt around Inverurie, Turriff and Ellon is the defining early flow — Scotland's single biggest rape region. Hawthorn and sycamore carry the post-rape period; lime lights Aberdeen's granite streets in June. The heather of Royal Deeside, the Ladder Hills and the Cabrach gives one of the finest and most commercially worked heather honey flows in Britain. Bilberry and hill forage add; a short but real ivy flow on the granite villages finishes the year.