Bee swarm in Yarm? Help is a minute away.

Yarm is a well-preserved Georgian coaching town sitting in a tight horseshoe meander of the River Tees, its elegant High Street lined with brick townhouses and a cobbled market place. The riverside willows and alder carr on the Tees banks either side of Yarm Bridge give bees an early catkin and blossom source; hawthorn is dense on the farmland hedgerows of Preston-on-Tees and Kirklevington; and the oilseed rape on the flat plain between Yarm and Darlington opens the main spring flow in late April.

Oilseed rape on the flat arable plain between the Tees and the Cleveland escarpment produces a heavy April to May flow, particularly around Stokesley, Stillington and the fields east of Yarm. Hawthorn and blackthorn are thick in the suburban hedgerows of Stockton, Billingham and Guisborough. Lime trees line the Victorian residential streets of Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Redcar and carry a reliable June flow. The defining feature of the landscape is the extent of ex-industrial grassland: former ICI works at Billingham and Wilton, steelworks sites at Redcar, and colliery reclamation ground throughout are dense with bramble, rosebay willowherb and white clover from June through August. Sea buckthorn and coastal meadow wildflowers on the North Tees marshes, Coatham Sands and Huntcliff provide a distinctive supplement near the shore. The Cleveland Hills rise sharply south of Guisborough, Skelton and Loftus and carry ling heather and bilberry from late July into September — within easy reach of apiaries on the urban fringe.