A swarm means losing half your colony and the season's honey in one afternoon. SunnyBee is the only beekeeping app that automatically converts queen cell observations into urgent timed alerts — so you act before the swarm, not after it.
Get Swarm Alerts FreeDuring any inspection, you mark whether you found swarm cells, emergency cells, or supersedure cells. This takes one tap in QUICK mode or a dropdown in FULL mode.
The moment queen cells are logged, SunnyBee creates an URGENT task on your calendar with a 72-hour deadline. This reflects the biological window: capped cells swarm within 24–48 hours. You have time to act — but not much.
A SWARM_ALERT push notification is sent to all devices connected to your account. If you have a team, every member with access to that apiary receives the alert.
Perform your swarm management technique — artificial swarm, Demaree, split — and mark the task complete in SunnyBee. The action is logged in the hive's history permanently.
No waiting. The moment queen cells are recorded in an inspection, a SWARM_ALERT push notification fires immediately to every connected device.
An URGENT task is created with a precise 72-hour deadline — calibrated to the biological window between cell capping and swarm departure.
On PRO plan, the swarm alert reaches every team member with access to that apiary. No single point of failure — the whole team knows simultaneously.
Swarm alerts are part of SunnyBee's wider biological intelligence. Log eggs and get Day 9 (capping) and Day 21 (emergence) tasks created automatically.
Alerts fire only when you explicitly record queen cells. SunnyBee does not guess — the alert is triggered by your direct field observation, not an algorithm.
Every swarm event, alert, and management action is stored permanently in the hive's inspection history. See the pattern across seasons.
Queen cells are capped on approximately day 8 of development. Swarming typically occurs within 24–48 hours after the first cells are capped. A 72-hour task gives you a realistic but urgent window to intervene with management before the swarm departs.
You can record the cell type (swarm, emergency, supersedure) during the inspection. Swarm cells trigger the highest urgency alert. Supersedure cells trigger a standard alert — the colony is replacing the queen but not swarming.
The inspection is recorded offline, but the push notification fires as soon as your device reconnects to the internet and syncs the inspection data. Team alerts work the same way.
Yes. Individual notification preferences can be managed per-hive in the app settings.
Mark the URGENT task as complete and add a note about the action taken. This closes the alert and adds the swarm event to the hive's history timeline.
The only beekeeping app with automatic swarm detection.
Get Swarm Alerts Free