Bee swarm in Hanslope? Help is a minute away.

Hanslope is an ironstone village on the Northamptonshire border plateau north of Milton Keynes, its exceptionally tall Perpendicular church spire of St James the Great a landmark across the Great Ouse plain. The village sits on a broad arable plateau with extensive oilseed rape growing on the Salcey and Hartwell farm fields; hawthorn hedgerows are dense along the Castlethorpe Road and Hartwell Lane field boundaries; and the Tove valley below the village carries meadow wildflowers and riverside willows toward Grafton Regis.

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.