Bee swarm in Southwold? Help is a minute away.

Southwold is a small seaside town of singular character on the Suffolk coast — its lighthouse standing among the rooftops, its coloured beach huts and pier extending into the North Sea, its old town built on a sandy plateau above the Blyth estuary and the Reydon marshes. The sheltered hinterland of the Blyth valley and the heathland of Dunwich Forest and the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB offer a distinctive coastal-lowland forage for bees: heather on the coastal heaths from late July, bramble dense on the bracken-heathland edges, sea-buckthorn and elder on the dune and shingle margins, and a good hawthorn flow on the inland hedgerows of the Holton and Wrentham agricultural landscape. Adnams Brewery's maltings and the town's sheltered walled gardens contribute to an unusual and productive local beekeeping environment.

Oilseed rape dominates the early flow across the heavy East Suffolk and High Suffolk clays. Hawthorn and field maple follow on the hedgerows, giving way in June to a dependable lime flow in Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and Sudbury. The Sandlings — the coastal heath strip from Ipswich up to Lowestoft — produce bell and ling heather in good seasons, and the oilseed-rape / heather combination is still the backbone of commercial Suffolk beekeeping. Coastal buckthorn and ivy carry colonies into autumn.