Bee swarm in Irvine? Help is a minute away.

Irvine is a historic royal burgh and Scotland's last designated New Town, expanded from the 1960s on the banks of the River Irvine where it enters the Firth of Clyde. The town combines a medieval burgh core — where Robert Burns briefly lived — with large planned residential areas and the Magnum leisure centre on the harbour. The Irvine Beach Park and the mouth of the river provide coastal grassland with white clover, bird's-foot trefoil and sea plantain; the Eglinton Country Park, two miles north, offers 1,500 acres of mature woodland, parkland and the River Lugton corridor that is one of the most productive bee habitats in North Ayrshire. The Irvine valley farmland upstream carries hawthorn hedgerows and white clover through summer.

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.