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Great Coates is a village on the northwestern edge of Grimsby, historically a separate agricultural settlement in the flat Lincolnshire coastal plain and now largely surrounded by Grimsby's industrial and suburban expansion. The village retains its medieval church of St Nicholas, a working farm and the lanes and hedgerow network of the older fieldscape. Its position between the Humber Estuary industrial belt to the north and the oilseed rape farmland of the Wolds fringe to the south gives local apiaries access to a range of forage not easily available in the adjacent urban areas.

The flat arable belt running south from Grimsby towards Waltham and Holton le Clay carries some of the densest oilseed rape cultivation in England, giving apiary colonies a concentrated April flow that can build enormous early-season colony strength. Hawthorn is prolific in the hedgerow network along the Wolds escarpment and on the lanes towards Laceby, Waltham and Brigsley, with a reliable May blossom. Bramble is generous on the railway embankments, the scrub margins of the docks and the green lanes south of Cleethorpes. White clover fills the pastoral meadows and road verges through July. The Humber estuary saltmarshes fringing Immingham and Healing carry sea lavender and sea purslane through August — a distinctive estuarine nectar source rarely available inland. Sycamore and lime line the Victorian residential streets of Grimsby and Cleethorpes, while ivy on the older brick terraces, dock walls and churchyards closes the forage year in October.