Bee swarm in Rainham? Help is a minute away.

Rainham is a large residential town at the eastern end of the Medway conurbation, where the urban fringe gives way to the Rainham farmland and the Bloors Lane Country Park. The mature fruit orchards surviving on the Rainham plateau between the town and Newington carry a strong April blossom flow; hawthorn is thick on the Moor Street and Bloors Lane farmland hedgerows; and the Motney Hill nature reserve on the Medway estuary gives coastal meadow and saltmarsh wildflowers within range of the eastern suburbs.

The Medway valley fruit-growing tradition — the western part of the old Garden of England — gives apiaries south of Rochester access to extensive cherry, apple, pear and plum orchards in the Burham, Halling and Snodland areas, with a concentrated late-April to mid-May blossom flow. Oilseed rape is grown on the Hoo Peninsula plateau and the river-plain fields north of Cliffe, giving a strong April flow visible from the A228. Hawthorn is dense on the North Downs scarp hedgerows above Walderslade, Blue Bell Hill and Cuxton; the chalk downland between the Medway crossing and Bluewater carries dense blackthorn, hawthorn and field scabious. The Hoo Peninsula marshes at Cliffe Pools, Northward Hill and Cliffe Creek carry sea lavender, sea purslane and coastal meadow wildflowers through July and August — a distinctive estuarine forage note. Lime trees line the Victorian residential streets of Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham; bramble and elder are prolific on the old dockyard margins and the Medway riverside scrub. Ivy on the Rochester castle walls and the older city fabric closes the year in October.