Swarmed

Mission

To use data to turn honey bees into biomonitors for ecosystem health, starting with a beekeeper-led network that rescues bee swarms and captures on-the-ground data.

The challenge

Honey bees are sensitive bioindicators of ecosystem health. Their behavior, population patterns, and seasonal timing reflect environmental conditions, including air quality, pesticide exposure, climate shifts, and habitat availability. Yet no systematic infrastructure exists to collect and analyze this data at scale. Meanwhile, 1.5-2 million wild honey bee swarms form annually across Europe, the US, and Australia. Fewer than 25% survive without intervention. Each lost swarm represents not just dead bees, but lost data about the environment they came from. Beekeeping remains fragmented, and the potential for bees to serve as distributed environmental sensors remains largely untapped.

The solution

Swarmed is a honey bee rescue network that connects the public with local beekeepers. When someone reports a swarm, we notify nearby beekeepers who coordinate pickup. This solves an immediate coordination problem while generating structured data on every rescue: location, timing, environmental conditions, swarm characteristics, and outcome. We've built a foundation of 15,000+ swarm reports and 4 million data points. The next stage is turning this into actionable biodiversity insights. We're now focused on developing tools to identify patterns in bee health, seasonal timing, and regional conditions, with the goal of making bees useful as biomonitors for ecosystem health.