Bee swarm in Fairlie? Help is a minute away.

Fairlie is a small village on the Clyde coast between Largs and West Kilbride, set directly on the water with the hills rising steeply behind. The village is notable for the Fairlie Castle ruins on the hillside and the former Hunterston nuclear power station to the south, whose grounds are now being considered as a green energy hub. The coastal strip below the village carries sea campion, thrift and coastal grassland; the steep hillside above has gorse, broom and heather starting almost from the back gardens of the village. The Noddle Burn runs through the village; the wooded policies of the Fairlie House estate carry sycamore and beech in the valley. This is one of the few places on the Ayrshire coast where heather ground is within a few hundred metres of the sea.

Hawthorn is the spring anchor on the Garnock valley field boundaries and the coastal farmland strips from mid-May. White clover dominates the mid-summer flow on the improved pastures around Irvine, Kilwinning and the coastal plain; the Eglinton Country Park lime and sycamore woodland provide the main structured town forage from June through July. Himalayan balsam has colonised the Garnock Water, Annick Water and River Irvine corridors, producing a sustained late-summer flow from mid-July into September. Gorse and broom are prolific on the rough hillside ground above the coast towns; heather starts on the Renfrewshire hill fringe above Beith and Kilbirnie from mid-July. The coastal grassland carries bird's-foot trefoil and sea clover through the full summer months.