Bee swarm in Padstow? Help is a minute away.

Padstow is a fishing town on the Camel Estuary in north Cornwall, sheltered from the Atlantic by the Doom Bar sandbar at the river mouth. The Camel Trail running east to Wadebridge and Bodmin follows the old railway line through reed bed, willow scrub and ancient hedged farmland — a long corridor of varied forage used by colonies from all the gardens and smallholdings alongside. Wadebridge Beekeepers serves this part of the north Cornish coast. The town's popularity as a tourist destination means swarm calls in the narrow streets and holiday cottages of the quayside are common in May and June.

The season opens with gorse on every headland, flowering intermittently most of the year but peaking in April. Blackthorn on the cob hedges lights up the byways; sycamore and hawthorn carry the early build; and the slow-growing pittosporum and myrtle in the sub-tropical gardens of the south coast provide unusual supplementary forage. Bramble is dominant through July, bell heather appears on Bodmin Moor and the Penwith commons in August, and the mild autumn leans on ivy and fuchsia hedging well into October.