Bee swarm in Ballantrae? Help is a minute away.

Ballantrae is a small coastal village at the southern tip of South Ayrshire, where the Stinchar Water meets the Firth of Clyde below Knockdolian Hill — the setting that gave Robert Louis Stevenson the title for his novel The Master of Ballantrae. The village is sheltered by the hill to the east, and the Stinchar valley behind carries improved dairy grassland with white clover, hawthorn hedgerows and the occasional elder. The coastal headland north and south of the village carries gorse and sea thrift, and the Bennan Head cliffs to the south provide sea campion, thyme and wild carrot on the exposed limestone.

White clover is the dominant forage in South Ayrshire: the extensive dairy grasslands of the Ayr basin, the Girvan valley and the Carrick plain carry an abundant June and July flow that underpins the local honey crop. Hawthorn and sycamore bridge the post-spring gap on field margins, estate hedgerows and shelter belts. Gorse flowers in two flushes — April and again in late summer — on the coastal headlands, Carrick hillsides and the hill ground around Straiton. The Carrick hills above Maybole and Girvan carry heather moorland accessible to beekeepers who move colonies to the hill in late July. Bramble is plentiful in the coastal scrub and farm hedge-bottoms through August, and the River Ayr and River Doon corridors add willow and alder to the spring forage.