Bee swarm in Castlethorpe? Help is a minute away.

Castlethorpe is a village in the Great Ouse floodplain north of Wolverton, its Norman castle motte and bailey earthwork and the Church of St Simon and St Jude surrounded by floodplain water meadows and arable fields on the Northamptonshire border. The Ouse Valley floodplain meadows at Tyringham and Filgrave carry hawthorn hedgerows and ox-eye daisy grassland; oilseed rape on the broad arable fields of the Tathall End and Hanslope plateau fills supers rapidly in late April; and the riverside willows and alders of the Great Ouse carry a catkin flow in early spring.

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.