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Swarm Reporting & Collecting all without Phone Calls! Sign Up your Association for 2025.  

+Apply to be a Swarm Coordinator here. or contact us at bee.watch@uwatch.co.uk

The Challenge

Traditional Swarm Coordinators spend many hours on the phone organising volunteer Swarm Collectors to answer reports from the public. Each year it is harder to find someone to give up 6 weeks of their time for this onerous yet vital task, whilst the valuable data they are collecting is never collated!

Without an efficient infrastructure, time and resources are further frittered away on false & duplicate reports, unviable or inaccessible swarms. All of which begin at the reporting stage…

Benefits

  • Eliminates routine phone calls.
  • Collectors’ contact information isn’t publicised.
  • Swarm alerts are produced in real-time.
  • Eliminate duplicate callouts & Swarm Hoarding!
  • Prevent Swarm Wars!
  • Control the area you receive alerts from. 
  • Map all Historical data to see geo-spatial patterns. 
  • Data is securely stored on an ISO27001-approved host and can be exported.
  • Link with pest control companies to eliminate Wasps and hornets that are reported.
  • System can be up and running within 48 hours. 
  • Costs only £8/Collector for the whole season. 

Bee.Watch Swarm Reporting

The Bee.Watch system enables the reporting of swarms and delivers recorded information to local collectors' smartphones. When a member of the public reports a Swarm the phones of all registered collectors within range of the swarm will buzz with a notification. The Swarm is advertised on a first-come first-served basis and the whole process of reporting a swarm via Bee.Watch takes less than a minute. 

The alert the collectors receive contains all the information needed for the collector to assess the swarm’s viability without relying completely on the accuracy of the reporter. Swarm alerts contain:

  • Picture of the Swarm
  • GPS location
  • Contact information of the reporter
  • Anything else (text) the reporter feels is valuable  

Once the Collector has "adopted" the swarm, the notification is removed from other Collectors' smartphones and the 'adopter' is prevented from adopting any additional Swarms. This ensures that other collectors don't attend to the site and secondly, prevents anyone hoarding Swarms.

Swarm collectors provide an essential service for their community but cannot devote all of their time. If a collector is unable to collect all they need to do is simply sign out of the app and one of their neighbouring collectors will answer the call.  

Ways to report a Swarm

  • Through an API (application program interface) that can be installed onto your website for free, and which can be seen here!
  • Through our Bee.Watch and Bystander apps, Bystander can be downloaded here for FREE. 

Swarm Coordinator 

The association nominates someone to become the Swarm Coordinator to manage and build their Swarm Network. They will create Collector accounts, establish the area that Collectors can collect from and collate all the geospatial data on the health of local bee populations, year on year for bespoke analysis. 

Available through our secure website portal the coordinator has access to the collector’s contact info to flag an unadopted swarm or request the status of a pending collection. However, it should be stressed that the system is designed to run autonomously and does not require day-to-day management.

The Swarm Coordinator also has access to an interactive swarm map that updates in real-time with the statuses of all active swarm alerts. Through the map the coordinator can see all IWAS (I Want a Swarm) requests, which are requests to receive a swarm. This allows members who are unable to make a collection to log their desire to receive a swarm of which is advertised to a collector when collecting the swarm , a perfect option for beekeeping beginners!