Bee swarm in Central Milton Keynes? Help is a minute away.

Central Milton Keynes is the planned city centre of the new city, its glass-roofed shopping centre, Campbell Park and the Grand Union Canal corridor giving bees a productive urban landscape. The Campbell Park lime and ornamental tree avenues carry the main June city-centre flow; the Grand Union Canal towpath hawthorn and bramble scrub runs north toward Cosgrove and south toward Fenny Stratford; and the grid-square parkway boulevards planted with lime and ash in the 1970s–80s now carry a reliable summer flow across the city.

Oilseed rape is grown extensively on the agricultural plain around Castlethorpe, Hanslope and the fields north of Wolverton, opening the main flow in late April; the Great Ouse floodplain meadows carry white clover and riverside wildflowers through June and July. The linear parks of the new city — Ouzel Valley Park, Loughton Valley, Linford Wood and Campbell Park — carry lime trees, hawthorn and bramble through a long urban season. Lime trees were planted extensively on the boulevards and parkway margins of the new city in the 1970s and 1980s and now carry a strong June urban flow across the grid squares; hawthorn and blackthorn are thick on the original field hedgerows surviving within the linear parks. Woburn Sands and Aspley Heath, straddling the Bedfordshire border, carry heather and gorse on acidic sandy soils — an unusual local forage note for a lowland Midlands city. Bramble is prolific on the Redway scrub and former railway embankments; ivy on the stone walls of the old villages closes the year.