Bee swarm in Portlethen? Help is a minute away.

Portlethen is a rapidly grown commuter town on the Aberdeenshire coast nine miles south of Aberdeen, straddling the A90 between the city and Stonehaven. Despite its modern housing estates, the town sits in productive bee country: the Cowie Water valley and the hinterland fields carry substantial oilseed rape in spring, and the Portlethen Moss nature reserve — a fragment of raised bog to the west of the town — is ringed by hawthorn and birch scrub with early spring pollen from goat willow and pussy willow. The coastal headlands south of the town give bird's-foot trefoil and sea clover on the clifftop turf, and white clover is abundant on the improved pastures of the Mearns farmland stretching inland. Mature sycamore lines the older sections of the village above the cliff edge.

Oilseed rape on the vast arable belt around Inverurie, Turriff and Ellon is the defining early flow — Scotland's single biggest rape region. Hawthorn and sycamore carry the post-rape period; lime lights Aberdeen's granite streets in June. The heather of Royal Deeside, the Ladder Hills and the Cabrach gives one of the finest and most commercially worked heather honey flows in Britain. Bilberry and hill forage add; a short but real ivy flow on the granite villages finishes the year.