Bee swarm in Girvan? Help is a minute away.

Girvan is a coastal town at the southern end of the Carrick coast, facing Ailsa Craig — the dramatic volcanic plug that dominates the outer Firth of Clyde — from its harbour and beach. The town has a compact town centre with a busy fishing and leisure harbour, and the Girvan Water valley to the east carries improved dairy farmland with white clover through the summer. The Carrick hills rise steeply behind the town and carry heather and gorse on the open moorland above Dailly and Straiton. The coastal grassland south of the town towards Turnberry carries links turf and sea thrift on the cliff tops.

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.