Bow Brickhill is a village on the sandstone ridge south of Milton Keynes, its hilltop church of All Saints visible across the whole Ouse Valley plain below. The Bow Brickhill woods — a mixture of mature oak, beech and Corsican pine — carry a spring canopy bloom; heather and gorse appear on the sandier ridgeline soils above the village; and hawthorn hedgerows frame the agricultural lanes toward Stoke Hammond and Soulbury on the clay vale below.
Collectors attend swarms on the church eaves and garden walls of All Saints at the ridge top, in the Bow Brickhill wood scrub and heather margins above the village, in the orchard and garden plots of the older cottages along Church Road and Top Road, and in the hawthorn hedgerows of the lower farmland lanes toward Stoke Hammond and Newton Longville.
Nearest BBKA-affiliated associations to help with swarm collection and local advice.
MK9 3EP· approx. 7 km
Visit websiteHP22 5TE· approx. 23 km
Visit websiteSG6 1NX· approx. 32 km
Visit websiteAssociation data sourced from the British Beekeepers Association directory via SwarmBase.
Oilseed rape is grown extensively on the agricultural plain around Castlethorpe, Hanslope and the fields north of Wolverton, opening the main flow in late April; the Great Ouse floodplain meadows carry white clover and riverside wildflowers through June and July. The linear parks of the new city — Ouzel Valley Park, Loughton Valley, Linford Wood and Campbell Park — carry lime trees, hawthorn and bramble through a long urban season. Lime trees were planted extensively on the boulevards and parkway margins of the new city in the 1970s and 1980s and now carry a strong June urban flow across the grid squares; hawthorn and blackthorn are thick on the original field hedgerows surviving within the linear parks. Woburn Sands and Aspley Heath, straddling the Bedfordshire border, carry heather and gorse on acidic sandy soils — an unusual local forage note for a lowland Midlands city. Bramble is prolific on the Redway scrub and former railway embankments; ivy on the stone walls of the old villages closes the year.
More on beekeeping in Milton KeynesReport it in under a minute and a trained local beekeeper will arrange safe collection.
