Bee swarm in Dunure? Help is a minute away.

Dunure is a small coastal fishing village on the Ayrshire shore south of Ayr, where a ruined sixteenth-century castle stands on the basalt headland above the harbour and the Firth of Clyde stretches west to the Arran hills. The village is set in a distinctive coastal bee landscape: gorse on the sea-facing slopes provides one of the most sustained early-spring flows on the Ayrshire coast, flowering from March through May on the windward ground above the harbour. The agricultural land immediately behind the village carries improved dairy pasture with white clover through June and July. The Kennedy Park and the coastal rough ground carry bramble and sea thrift through the summer months; the sheltered village gardens and the castle grounds hold sycamore and elder.

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.