Bee swarm in Fochabers? Help is a minute away.

Fochabers is a planned estate village on the River Spey at the eastern boundary of Moray, laid out in the eighteenth century by the Duke of Gordon when the original village was moved to make way for Gordon Castle policies. The village square, wide streets and mature lime trees give Fochabers one of the finest planned streetscapes in the north-east. The River Spey at Fochabers carries a wide gravel and sand bank system with riverside alder, willow and elder through to the Spey Bay nature reserve on the coast, one of the best osprey-viewing sites in Scotland. Oilseed rape grows on the Laigh farmland upstream.

Oilseed rape on the coastal Laigh of Moray is the defining spring flow: dense sowings between Elgin, Forres and Fochabers flower from late April and can fill a super rapidly on warm days. White clover follows on the improved grassland and roadside verges of the coastal plain through June and July. Sycamore is the dominant woodland forage tree, supplemented by hawthorn on field margins and elder along burn and river corridors. The heather of the Speyside hills and the Dava Moor above Grantown provides a significant late-summer crop accessible from Forres, Keith and the inland villages. Raspberries are grown commercially in parts of the Spey valley, adding a nectar source less common elsewhere in Scotland.