The Way To Bee with Frederick Dunn - How To get FREE Honey Bees through BeeSwarmed. Interview with Mateo

Episode Date: April 7, 2025

In this interview, Mateo Kaiser explains updates and benefits associated with BeeSwarmed: https://youtu.be/NZ29kedeBC0   Swarmed: https://beeswarmed.org/ Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/swarmed/1274872457/ email where viewers are welcome to contact Mateo: [e-mail]

So hello and welcome to another episode of interviews with innovators. Have you lost your bees? Are you just finishing a beekeeping course? And now you need to get those new hives filled. With everything costing so much these days, how would you like to register for free honeybees? Collecting a bees warm is fun, exciting, and hard to beat when it's free. In today's interview,

we catch up with Mateo Kaiser. Mateo and his talented collaborators have put together a fantastic platform for Swarm Reporting and where beekeepers just like you can register for Honeybee Swarm Alerts. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this is The Way to Be. Here's Mateo.

So hello, Mateo. Welcome to another interview. A lot has happened over the past year with beesworm.org, and I'm really glad that we can get you back on and let people know. What I would like you to do to start off with is explain who you are, where you are, and what the whole purpose is behind B-swarmed.org for those who are just joining us for the first time.

Yeah. Thanks very much for having me back, Fred. You and I talked last year, right when this project got started. It's come a long, long way since then, so I'm looking forward to talking about that. I'm a tale. Since we last spoke, I became a certified master beekeeper with the University of California Davis program. So now I've got a credential to my name as well, but I've been a beekeeper for five or six years now. I like to say I'm a fourth generation beekeeper.

It skipped a generation before reaching me, but now my parents are beekeepers as well. So I like to say fourth generation beekeeper. And I, alongside some partners and a lot of beekeepers in the community, built Swarmed, basically a free tool to get alerted when a swarm is reported near you. I would spend my spring combing through Facebook next door, different social media sites, trying to find people who are posting about swarms, and invariably, I used to be too late, or I'd spend way too much time looking for them and wouldn't hear about them on time. And so the way Swarmed works is folks go to our website or one of our partner's websites. They report a swarm, and then the system automatically looks for the nearest beekeepers

and sends them a text message or an email. But most beekeepers, they get a text message, super fast. First beekeeper to claim the swarm gets the address and the contact details. So super simple. and now is working every day to get swarms to beekeepers across the U.S. That's fantastic. And I can say that the system works because we spread the word about that here. I got 15 to 18 notifications where I am here in the state of Pennsylvania.

I did not respond to any of them because I had all the bees I needed, but I had the options. So that was really good. And the system is functioning anywhere where you access the internet. Is that right? You can register on. And the full website is B-swarmed. Is that going to change?

Okay, so that's it. So how did the year go? What kind of participation do you have? Yeah, so went super well. We got started already a little bit into the spring swarm season last year, and so we really hit the ground running, and it spent a lot of time perfecting the system. In that first spring, we handled, I want to say,

about 2,000 B swarms. Of course, not all of those were swarms, but at least 2,500,000 reports came through the system in the spring. So I was super happy with that. That was without a ton of outreach. And that to me also really showed that this was some people were looking for. That was when I didn't have time to be doing a lot of deep outreach, I was fixing bugs on the website, trying to make sure everything worked smoothly,

answering beekeepers questions, working with some associations in Pennsylvania, who were some of the first associations to join and use the system for their whole club. And so there's so much work to do there that I didn't have time to do a lot of outreach. But pretty early on, we had enough beekeepers joined, those first kind of 2,000 beekeepers that joined, that gave us enough coverage across the U.S. That most swarms that get reported would find their way to a beekeeper.

And so last spring, handled about 2,000. And for this spring, setting the high goal of reaching 10,000 swarms. And so now we've had time to really develop an outreach strategy to make sure that when people are looking up, bee swarm removal, looking for help with this sort of thing, that they're finding either the swarmed website or a partner website.

So we're expecting, already seeing now as the swarm season starts, way more swarms than last year. And so it's super exciting how it's grown since we last spoke. So when you're mentioning those swarm numbers that were reported and collected, we're talking nationwide or just in California? That's nationwide? That's USwide, yeah. USwide. And is this available in other countries as well?

Technically, yes. I've had interest from other countries. Of course, it's a little bit like a social media network in the sense that it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to get people to report swarms in Europe if there are no beekeepers signed up there, right? But for next November, it's looking like we'll be expanding all of a sudden in Australia because a lot of the Australian associations are all part of one overarching organization and their umbrella organization is going to be joining and bringing, I believe, something like two or three thousand members with them. We'll be using the system across Australia, which is super

exciting too since the seasons are switched, right? So their swarm season is in, I believe, November, October, and so then super exciting that the website will get UC around, right? Since the winter is a pretty quiet time, that's when I work on deeper improvements, fixing problems that I didn't have time to fix. But now for next November, it'll be a busy time as well. And as you mentioned, I think the Northwestern Pennsylvania Beekeepers Association did adopt that program, and we have it on our website. What is a difference between an individual signing on and getting an association to host it on their website. How does that work? Yeah. So really early on, this was actually not my original goal. I wasn't part of an association. And so part of my thinking was

this would be a great way for beekeepers who aren't in associations to hear about swarms, since if you're not part of a club or if your regional club isn't prominent or really structured, you may have a really hard time finding out about swarms. But then pretty early on, I started hearing from really well-organized clubs who wanted to jump on this. And so alongside, yeah, Northwestern Pennsylvania beekeepers, the Sacramento beekeepers, who see about a thousand swarms a year just in their area of California, right? There's a lot of agriculture there. And a couple of associations already thought of a similar system, right? This isn't an original idea, right? I hear all the time from beekeepers who say, I had just this idea, but didn't know how to build it, right? And so

some of those people who've reached out have become contributors and some of those associations who came to me and said, look, we've been thinking of something just like this, but didn't know how to build it, have become contributors and helped shape now what. what swarmed looks like for associations. And so the way that works is that associations can join and get all of their members on board as well. And then those members get swarms from the general system, but they also get exclusive access to the swarms

from that association, right? So if the swarm is coming through the association's website, it gets tagged as sort of belonging to that association, right? Because there is a sort of reputational risk, right? If my association is putting this out there, Some associations, they want to restrict those to just to just their members. It offers a nice way to incentivize members joining your association as well. And so they have, so their own little list of their members.

And that's one of the ways they'm able to keep sworn to a free service for the beekeeping community, right, is that associations, they pay an annual fee or it's a suggested contribution. So it's flexible to whatever the association's budget is. And they make that contribution. And then I set them up with their own reporting form, with their logo on it that they can put on their website. So people don't have to leave their website. They can just report the swarm right there. And then those swarms, they have the option of restricting those swarms to just their members, right? So that they know who's going after those.

See, you know, I'm glad we're talking because I didn't even realize that. I know we sent a donation and I know we have it on our website, but I did not realize that what that meant was that those alerts that get reported through our website only go to the members that are listed there. Now it comes into focus. I'm a little slow. No, no, I think actually the Northwestern Pennsylvania beekeepers, I think they opted to share them with everyone. Okay, okay.

Or maybe we set this up when before I had this as an option, right? This is all of the things here grew out of beekeepers asking for them, right? And people saying this was something we really wanted. And so I didn't build that until an association came along and said, actually, we'd love to use this, but we want to really restrict it to our members because we don't want to run into problems when Joe down the street claims saying that people come to our website for, right? And then someone ran that up. Yeah. And that's the other thing that kind of comes to mind. If just anybody can respond, there's almost no, you know,

we have a list of responders through our website, people that we know and we know their experience levels and things like that. When it's out in the general public, I mean, it can be a person that just bought a beehive and decides now, how do I get my bees? Oh, look, I'll sign on to be swarmed in the first call that comes in. I'm going to go get them. And then they have no idea how to go and do it. I've thought about all kinds of ways to certify the people who join, right?

Like, since there's no, right, a lot of beekeepers don't have a master beekeeper certificate like you or I do, right? And so there's no good way to recognize someone's experience, right? Someone could say they have 10 years experience. And if they do, then great. But otherwise, it's really hard to tell. Right. There's no, there's no beekeepers license, right? And so there's the option to skip the beekeeper.

So for example, if someone claims the swarm that you report and is not able to help you out, then you can skip them and make it available again. but other than that, those are some of the kind of safeguards. There's a lot of little bumpers built into the system to avoid those sorts of things. Okay, let me ask this, since it's undergoing, actually, you've made a lot of changes and including there are going to be ways for you to drive some income from the site because before it's always been free to the public. Would there be, you know, like you get an Uber that comes to pick you up and you get to grade that Uber one to five or I don't know what their ranking system is,

would it be possible to assign a one to five star rating for the person that comes to collect those bees until we find out pretty soon? There's kind of some swarm collections out there with five star ratings who have done six swarm collections and they build some confidence that way. Is there any thought behind that? Yeah, so I've thought about things like this. It's technically possible. I do keep an eye on the list of beekeepers who get skipped. So if someone's name is showing up there over and over again, I do reach out and say, hey, what's going on here? And the people do, they leave a reason, right, for why they skip that beekeeper.

And if I see someone's name cropping up or if, or if there's feedback there that that beekeeper was, right, messed up somehow. And then I do look into that. Right now, there's, since it's first come first serve for beekeepers, right, there's no, the homeowner doesn't get to choose their beekeeper. And so there's no, right, there's no point in collecting ratings and showing those to the homeowner, for example. to show them like you're getting a five-star beekeeper. But what I have considered is doing something, doing some sort of separate thing for certified removal specialists or master beekeepers,

the beekeepers who can help you with the really difficult tasks when it's not just a low-hanging swarm that's super easy to catch. And so I've been thinking about ways to get more of these professionals to use the tools since we do get a lot of removal jobs, right? And these are jobs that beekeepers can be, right, the beekeepers can be charging money for and that my only goal is to get these, right, get the people who report these removals, a person who can help them out. And so I've been thinking about different ways to kind of figure out who are the more qualified people,

who are the, right, who have experience with swarms, but also experience with removals and can help, can help out with those, since those do come through the system. And those are the ones that tend not to get claimed as quickly. Right. If you post a nice swarm, right, a good picture, it's not too high up. You can in most areas in the U.S. expect that to go to a beekeeper in a couple of minutes and then hear from beekeeper really quickly. But if you post a picture of your chimney, it can take a while before beekeeper comes along or you may not hear from someone at all. Yeah, or in your crawl space. Yeah, exactly. So I've seen everything at this point. And so I see, now I haven't looked over the website very much lately, but do you have sponsors now that, like,

for example, I could think of BVAC manufacturers that would want to have sponsored ads on your website. Do you currently offer anything like that? Not so far. What we do, though, is we have different partners who host the reporting form on their website who are not bekeeping associations. And so that's things like the pollinator partnership, right? I think according to their website at least, they're the biggest not, the pollinator nonprofit in the U.S. And when you Google beastwarm removal, a lot of times their page is the first one to come up. And so we've been working with them to, well, they already have the form on their website. And I'd say about 10% of all the swarms in the system actually come

from them and about 20, 25% come from various partners who don't have members so they don't restrict the swarms to just their members, or they share them with all beekeepers as a service. And partly so that the beekeeper knows where that swarm is coming from, but also partly so that the association knows or so that the partner is getting something from it, we do include their logo on that. And so actually, I can show you a swarm report. That may be as helpful here. I can show you what this will look like in our new dashboard.

and then you'll see what that logo looks like there. And then that's one way that we encourage other associations, be keeping retailers now more and more as well, to include a Swarm Resources page. It's a way to engage the public, but also offer something really nice to beekeepers, or offer something that beekeepers obviously want, and then include your logo alongside that, right,

so that your clickable or your linked logo is coming there. Let me share that Swarm report real quick, and then you'll get an idea what that looks like. Can you see my screen, Fred? Yep. Looks good. Yeah, so this is what a swarm report looks like in the new dashboard that we're working on. So beekeepers who are using swarm now, this will look unfamiliar.

This is the new system that we're building. And so it's a little bit cleaned up compared to what's out there right now. Some of the things that they'll be added here is support for multiple photos so that people can upload more than one photo. As you get a couple of different angles on the swarm. A lot of the same information, right, the size, the situation, how high up is the swarm, how long has it been there, right? Is it a day, a week, an hour? Really crucial. And I think I actually hadn't added this when you and I last spoke was the property owner question. Since my goal is not to micromanage the process, it's just to make sure that the beekeeper

has all the information they need to make their own informed decision, right? And so one of the really important things is to know, well, is the person who reported this the property owner or am I going to respond and then have to talk to someone else or figure out with someone else if I can if I can come onto their property to deal with that, right? I've caught swarms through swarmed that are in park strips, right? And so there you've got to kind of figure out who's responsible for this park strip here. And so this is what a new swarm report, what the new swarm reporting form will look like. You see that big claim report button.

And that's if you're the first beekeeper to look at it or get there, you're able to claim it. And then it's yours. And you can see there that this one here, or the sample swarm is coming from the pollinator partnership. And so one of our one of our larger nonprofit partners that supports the project. And that's interesting because I did get the 15 alerts last year, but when I didn't take them, somebody else did within like 15 minutes.

So it's not like they just hung out there. So it has really streamlined, first of all, communication to those who want swarms. And we eliminated that overlapping, you show up and find out somebody's there or just left. Was there 10 minutes ago kind of thing? So the idea that you can claim it and then it reports as claimed and unavailable, as it says here. And then if you look at it and decide, oh, that's out of my league or they're too hot or it's the size of a softball and I don't want it anymore, you can probably add information and then unclaim it so that then it goes back out to the same radius that people report. Yeah, you're able to send it back out there. Yeah. And what I realize is the system was built for speed, right?

And when I realized pretty quickly is that beekeepers were actually learning that they need to act fast. And so I still get emails from beekeepers saying, I got my first notification. Man, I realized I got to be quicker because I clicked on that text message and it arrived five minutes ago and the swarm was already gone. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So sometimes the dekeepers are confused. They'll get a notification and then it'll go to their dashboard. They'll get that text message notification.

They'll go to their dashboard and the swarm will already be gone. And then sometimes there's some confusion. Well, how did that happen? It's that someone else was faster, right? And then you learn that you've got to be really quick, which of course. course is good because it makes sure that the person who reported the swarm who's maybe quite anxious about the situation is getting an answer quickly. And it makes sure that the bees are still there.

If you're the quicker someone's reacting, the higher the chances that the beekeeper actually gets the bees, they don't move on, right? And one of the things, too, that actually helps. And I built this as a nifty little add-on, but I hear from a lot of beekeepers that this actually really helpful and speeds things up for them, is that there's a button when you claim the swarm, when you see the address and the contact details. There's a button to send a text message. And actually, if you don't mind, I'll share what that looks like in the entire view,

because then you'll see what that whole new dashboard looks like. Since I know I shared this with you a little while back, but it's come a long way since I first showed it to you. So this is our new, what the new dashboard view will look like. And again, beekeepers who are using Swarm now will remember or will recognize that this is a big leap forward from what we have right now. It looks a lot smoother. will also work a lot better on your cell phone, right?

It's made to collapse nicely and fit nicely on your cell phone. But one of the things you'll notice here is, so this is a swarm that's been claimed, right? And then you see the contact details, you see the exact location, and there's that send message button. And what that does is you click on it, and it automatically generates a text message with your name,

right, it says, hey, I'm a tail, I'm a local beekeeper, I claim the swarm that you reported. I don't remember exactly what it says, but I claim the swarm. first message and then you, I think you write some more. So that first message is auto-generated for you so that you're able to technically claim a, get a text, claim the swarm, and then send a text message to the person who reported it all within like a minute or two.

So it's made to move really quickly and to make sure that they're getting the answer and that you're getting the bees. Now, what's the toughest challenge in getting the word out to people that are finding swarms, not those that need the bees, but the general public, I guess they do a Google search. They go on social media. And as you mentioned, one of the other groups shows up first as far as swarm reporting. What should we be telling people is the best way to get the word out for beesworm.org so that they know that it even exists.

Because they're only going to think about bees for the first time ever when they see them in their yard. Exactly. Right. So I don't need people to know about this until they have a swarm in their yard. Right. And so there I do a – this is a lot of – what I end up doing, right? So the website and building this is one thing. That's, that's what I really enjoy doing is a really interesting thing to work on. But a lot of the nitty gritty of what

I actually end up doing is outreach. And so that's everything from getting our reporting form onto nonprofit partners, right, like the pollinator partnership, different partners, getting it to local associations, right? So if you look up, be removal in X town, right? Most likely, whatever I do, the local association will still be ranking higher in the Google search than I will. And so working with that local association, not against them, right? And so to make sure that we're working together. But more and more, I've been realizing that actually this is one of the services that we're able to provide to beekeepers is that as an individual beekeeper,

there's a lot of outreach avenues that aren't open to you that are open to us since we work nationally, right? And so, for example, what I do now a lot is, for one thing, we do paid ads now. And so now they have a little bit of money coming in through these contributions from associations and donations from beekeepers and things like that. We're able to do some paid ads to make sure that when people are Googling, B swarm removal, that we're ranking above pest control companies, right? And that other people who are actually getting on these. And that's something that's not open to an individual beekeeper, right? If just Fred, right, it doesn't make sense to run ads in just your really local area where you want swarms. And so we're able to really go national and run ads everywhere and try to get as many swarms in that way.

That's saying we just started last week. And so beekeepers will start to see results of that pretty soon. So we've started to see swarms coming in from that now. And a lot of these other outreach tactics, I honestly, I don't love doing this, but I've been more and more now been responding to pitches from newspapers and pitching swarm as a national platform. And especially in the context this year with the really high loss rates that beekeepers are seeing, right? I was just this week, the Guardian, all the top newspapers, right, are all writing about this year's high loss rate.

And so there's also some interest in writing about tools to help beekeepers, right, in this difficult situation, or help beekeepers make up for these losses. And so pitching swarmed is a story to journalists. And this maybe seems irrelevant to beekeepers. But what that ends up meaning is if a newspaper writes a story about Swarmed and includes a link to it in there in the article, right? Not only does maybe their article come up when you look for B-Swarm removal, right, you're maybe actually then finding a newspaper article and finding Swarmed through that, but just them including the link to Swarmed, increases our reputation, our authority with Google and the other search engines.

And so the more reputable, the more authoritative we become, right? The more likely it is that people find our website at the top of Google results without us doing anything. And so right now we're busy working to game the system, right? How can we make sure that through paid ads and these different outreach methods getting to where the public is when they're reporting swarms, right? I do some social media as well. I don't love doing this. I don't like spending my whole my time on Facebook and Instagram doing social media. But we do a little bit of that as well.

What I tell beekeepers, actually on our, I believe, on our spread the buzz page on the website, there's some, there's like a poster you can download. So there's some like outreach materials that beekeepers are welcome to share in their local community. Right. So I very much locally, right, like in my town, I put up flyers. So I print out the poster from the website and I put it up around town. I post in the local Nextdoor page. I don't know how I think it's pretty widespread in a lot of suburban neighborhoods. Next door is a really good place that people turn to for this sort of thing.

And so I try to post there in my local next door every spring, putting up the flyer. really the number one thing, though, to get more swarms reported in your area is to get your association to join, right? That tends to be the really the thing that gets a lot of swarms reported. And so in Pennsylvania, I want to say that four or five are the biggest associations in the state have all joined. And so there are tons and tons of swarms coming in across Pennsylvania because they serve as ambassadors, right? And so really the thing that helps the most is when an individual beekeeper or an association is sort of an on-the-ground ambassador for spreading the word. But I'm I try to spend my time doing the sort of thing that individual beekeepers couldn't really feasibly do in their area, right? So to help out that way and do that to a national work. Okay, so, and you're making some changes. What is the purpose of the crowdfunding campaign that's coming up? What's going on there? Yeah.

And so we're about to launch a crowdfunding campaign. We can go ahead and collapse that screen, by the way. Yes, yeah, sure. Good reminder, yeah. I don't know if we. Perfect. Yeah, now you seem a bit better. Okay.

Perfect. Yeah, so we're putting, or we've put together a crowdfunding campaign that is going live in the next couple days. And so what we're doing there is raising some money to be able to build the dashboard that you've seen there. We've developed a lot of interesting data tools now, too, that now that we're seeing so many more swarms come in. There's all kinds of interesting data that we're able to collect. That is interesting to beekeepers, also interesting to researchers, and that nobody else is really collecting. If you have a traditional swarm list, a lot of associations don't even know how many swarms or, swarm calls they're getting, right? Since if you just put a phone list out there, not only are your beekeepers getting a lot of spam calls because of that, right, but you're not, you don't even know

who's calling, right? So you're super hard to keep track of that. And so I realized that we're actually collecting some really interesting data that beekeepers might want to see. These data tools start to get pretty difficult or a little bit more complicated to build. It takes a lot of time and effort. And so we're doing a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money needed to build that dashboard and to roll that out. We've already started building. It's basically just to get us over the last, the last hurdles to getting that out there the next month and a half. And so like you saw, it's all, a lot of this is already in progress, but a lot of these sort of deeper data tools, we need some extra support to make that happen. And we've had a lot of great support from beekeepers.

And so it made a lot of sense to turn to the community that's already using the tool that's already using Swarmed and ask them if they want to support this, right? And so it's an all or nothing campaign. And so in a sense, if people don't like what we've put together, right? And so we've, we've run this by a lot of the beekeepers using Swarmed. But if people don't think what we built is cool, then and don't contribute, then we just won't build it, right? And if we don't, if we don't meet our goal. So it's a way for us, too, to see if this is really saying that beekeepers won. But so far the reaction from beekeepers who I've shown the designs, right? And so our little team of volunteer contributors are all beekeepers as well, who've given their, their feet.

feedback. And I'm personally, I'm really excited about these data tools. You may have seen it on the on the mockup that I showed earlier. We're going to have a swarm predictor predict. We're based on some pretty solid research. We can predict the likelihood of a swarm on a given day, which I thought was sort of a gimmick when I first thought of this, but was showing this to beekeepers and they all thought it was a really nifty idea that you can tell. Right. And a lot of beekeepers sort of know this, right, when is a likely swarm day. But we're able to based on tens of thousands of history. historical data points of past swarms that we've gotten to from citizen science databases, so things like iNaturalist. We really get all this historical data on tens of thousands of swarms and feed that into the predictive model to be able to predict how likely is a swarm going to be in your area today. We're also able to predict sort of the rough season in an area. So when is the peak swarm season, when does the peak swarm season start, when does swarm season end?

I think those are things that a lot of beekeepers are interested in. And so we'll be able to show that. What am I forgetting? Yeah, the peak bloom times in an area is something that we're working on as well. Oh, and the last thing that was a request from some of our partners was a heat map. So seeing where are swarms reported in the past, right? Where are the hotspots in my area? So you can see where all the swarms are coming in, which has potential, right,

that then you're able to place your swarm traps accordingly. So if you know that this one corner is where historically a lot of swarms have happened, then maybe it makes sense to go and ask if you can maybe put a trap in someone's yard, right? And that helps beekeepers kind of get ahead of the game as well. And so that wasn't something that I thought of originally, but that was saying that when I was looking at the heat map and, well, we could do this, we could maybe build this thing. Beekeepers who I showed it to said, oh, I would use this to play swarm traps, right?

I would use this for that. That's something that I'm super excited to build, but that we can only build with a little bit of extra support. Have you spoken at all with Steve Rapasky from Pennsylvania, the author of Swarm Essentials? I have not. I'm a big fan of Dr. Seeley's work, and so I've read all of his books

and spoken with some other people who do research in this area. But if any reviewers, R.B researchers who want access to some of that, it's all anonymous or anonymized data, but if want access to our swarm data, that's saying that we're more than happy to share with anyone who's wanting to dig into that

because I don't have the time or our little team doesn't have the time to... Yeah, well, the reason I brought it up is it's in that book. you know, the prime time of day, prime weather conditions and so on, that you're most likely to see a swarm event. I just wondered if he had spoken with you, but I guess not. Yeah, I've collected a lot of research studies.

The model is actually based in part on a large-scale study in Germany, where they found, well, I think what a lot of beekeepers know, they found that after a couple of rainy days in spring, swarms are extremely likely, right? So that's one part of the model is looking at average precipitation, temperature, time of year, things like that. So it's based on a couple of different studies that we looked at. Yeah. If it's warm after a storm, expect a swarm.

There you go, yeah. A lot of beekeepers sort of intuitively know, right, and trying to visualize that in a really substantial way. Yeah, we know that at exactly 145 and 32 seconds in the afternoon, they will swarm. You can feel it. If you look closely enough, right? Yeah, you know.

In fact, they'll swarm the minute you give up watching for a swarm and you come in time. Yeah, it always happens when I'm away, I went away from the house, yeah. Have you seen this is off topic, but I was looking through the Better B catalog earlier today, and they had a swarm indicator that sticks on the front of a beehive. Do you know what I'm talking about? I've seen this. Yeah, yeah.

It's like a plastic line. They put this little cap, and when that comes off, you know, they've swarmed? To be honest, I don't know how helpful that is. I love all kinds of products around swarms. And so we have a little ways that we support, right? The website is through a little shop. and I try to just include some of our own products, but also affiliate links to products that I think are cool

that I like to use for catching swarms. I looked at that one when I was researching products. But to be honest, it didn't seem that helpful to me to know that your bees swarmed, right? Because you see it's a little opening right. And it's after the fact that, right? Yeah. Oh, no, they swarmed over there. Either that or a bunch of drones took off.

I don't know. And I noticed that myself, right? The next time you open the hive, you kind of notice that they swarmed, right? or even just from the entrance activity, you're seeing that they swarmed. And so to me, I don't know how helpful that is, but isn't if you gather.

For your master beekeeper program, you must have had to do a couple of projects. Was your website part of one of the course projects you did? Yeah, so they were kind enough to let me use, or use the continued development of Swarmed as my capstone project. Okay. So I wanted to come up with a new project since I was already busy enough with this one. So they were kind enough to recognize that.

They were generous enough to offer me, I guess, a scholarship for the program because they said, look, we want to work with you. But we want you to become a master beekeeper first. And so I jumped on that opportunity. That's fantastic. Okay. Well, that's really good. So now, what are some of the criticisms you've received? In other words, what are the complaints?

Let's start with the downside. Sure. Yeah. I think some of the concerns. I mean, I get concerns about privacy occasionally. to me it's a huge well first of it I don't use this data right I don't use the data for anything other than getting you swarm reports right so some beekeepers are a little bit reluctant to give their phone number or their email a lot of had bad experiences with putting their names on a public swarm list right I hear a lot of times

from beekeepers who have been trying to get their names off of one of these public lists for years right and trying to email some administrator somewhere to get their name off of a list because once you're right nowadays it's just not a good idea to put your phone number and your email on the internet publicly because they're bots scraping the internet, right, pulling these off and selling these. And so I get concerns about privacy occasionally. How is this? How is this done? I get some suspicion around like, how is this funded?

Or like, where does the money come from? To which the answer is, right, the goal was never really to make money with this. The goal is to keep it sustainable. Right, we have to pay the bills somehow. But the goal was not to squeeze the beekeeping community. The goal is to build a useful tool. And so all of the contributions, right? So we ask for a, we ask for a annual contribution from associations.

That's flexible, right? They can pick anything from five bucks to, well, we suggest 150, but that can, they can pick five bucks if they want. It's more of making, making a solidarity contribution. We will be asking beekeepers for a suggested contribution if they want access to the new data tools that we've built. But again, that can be $1 or it can be $5 or whatever. It's more about, about getting people who want to help out and want to contribute.

to making the project work, encouraging them to do that. Through the crowdfunding, we'll actually be offering a, I guess, lifetime access. So a one-time donation or a one-time contribution to the crowdfunding gets you and or your association lifetime access to everything that we're building forever. And so I get concerns about cost every now and then, either that it's too little or the suspicion around that, but that I'm usually able to explain away. I think one of the biggest things that I hear from associations is just that it feels too, that it feels technical, right?

They don't know why they would change away from their swarm list. And a lot of times they're because they maybe haven't seen, they, they haven't realized what some of the problems are with their swarm list. And for some of the small associations, it maybe is having, right, if you, if you only got five people responding to swarms, then maybe you're, you're okay with your call list or if those five people are really, are professionals as well. So some associations that have five pros, right, who do this as their business. And so then this looks a little bit different.

Some associations have a nice retired guy who's manning the phones 24-7 and doing like a personal concierge, right, answering every phone call, answering their questions, and then rounding that to the USBkeeper. If you have that, then you're super lucky, right? Like, I can't offer a service that, that human and that tailored. There's obviously upsides and downsides to that. But that's one of the things I hear as well. I really like the automated aspect because what you just described actually can turn into the, hey, John, I got another swarm for you. You know, instead of it going equally to everyone and giving them the opportunity because somebody's just a mile down the road from it, they kind of cherry pick their favorite people that need bees right now, which I like yours is much more equal.

Well, I've heard exactly that, right, where they said, yeah, we had a swarm coordinator, but there was some pushback. Because even if maybe even they're doing their best, but there's that human element where people then feel like they're maybe getting short, right? Like somebody feels like they're getting shortchanged, even if maybe they're not. Yeah, it's human. They, you know, they select their friends first. Hey, you need some fees. I got a, I got a perfect one. It's eye level.

It's on a mailbox, you know. And what's impossible to do, or it's really hard to do unless you have a really committed volunteer or if you're paying someone is to record the data. So even some associations have phone trees, right? Right. And phone shows are actually really expensive to maintain. and even then it's really hard you can maybe record the number of calls you're getting but you can't

you don't get any kind of idea of the data so some of the things that we're able to show is like how big are the swarms that you're that you're seeing how many bees are roughly a way to post a photo now is there any I know we access this from our phone because they even checked it on my

phone to make sure everything was so good yeah yeah is there any need to produce a phone app Yeah, and so this is one of our kind of reach goals. So if in the crowdfunding campaign, if we raise more than our goal, that'll go towards eventually building an app. We've been laying some of the groundwork for this, but to be honest, I haven't put as much time or energy towards this. To me, building an app is a pretty big investment and building an app that works well, right? I wouldn't want to build a bad app and then make beekeepers download some crap on their phone.

and so to build something good would take quite a lot of effort and a lot of resources on our part. And so I've been holding off on that and really now with this new kind of revamp of the website, the goal is because most peakkeepers are using this on their phone, right? If you're getting a text alert, you're clicking on the link in that alert, and you're opening your, you're opening swarmed on your phone, right? And so really the focus has been on making it work better on your phone in the web app. And actually, there's a way that you're able to download or you're able to display websites as an app on your phone. So I actually, on my phone, I have swarmed as a little app there, right, so always accessible.

So you look here, right, I have the little swarmed. I don't know if the blur is, yeah. That's okay. Yeah, it works. You can have a little shortcut, right? But eventually we may do an app as we see more beekeepers join as that starts to make sense, or if we exceed our goal for the campaign, we'll maybe consider that. but right now is a pretty big investment for us.

Okay, so let's refresh just a little bit when people go to the campaign. What are the options, what would they get for their donations or the levels be? Yeah, let's see. So you can get lifetime access for yourself. You can just make a contribution if you want. One of the things is lifetime access for you and early access, so that we get this to you as absolutely as quickly as possible as we can and you can get feedback on it. Another kind of reward tier is lifetime access for you and your whole association,

right? So if you want to basically gift this to, if you're an association or you want to gift it to your club, right, if you want to say, hey, Fred got this for us, right? Make a one-time, one-time contribution and get your whole club lifetime access, which maybe is a bit of a too good deal, since I have to pay for the text message notifications forever. But, well, we're doing that. There's a sponsorship tier, if you really want to be a big promoter, one of the little things that I'm excited about, and this is one way that we want to get some non-beekeepers to support this as well, is doing custom bee stamps. And so I actually really like making, like, laser-cutting rubber stamps. And so we have a couple of designs. We also welcome custom designs from people. And so if beekeepers,

actually, you know what, I sent you one of these after we spoke last year, because this is a little hobby of mine. I sent you one, I think, with, oh, yeah, with your logo on it. And so- And I just now thought of it because you mentioned it. Yeah. I saw you, I saw that look on your face. I thought, oh, wait, I sent you one. Exactly.

And so I like to make these. And I thought it's nice, I like to label my honey with them. And so I thought this might be a nice little physical, right, since it's a website. So there's not like a physical product that you get, but a nice little add-on. And so we have those custom B stamps. And so if beekeepers want to send us their own design, we'll make them, make them a custom stamp out of it and send it to them. They can pick one of our designs. And the last thing, oh, yeah.

And we also are sharing a digital download or a printed copy of a beekeeping logbook. And so actually one of the biggest ways they were able to support the service is through selling copies of a basically checklist for inspecting your hive. So we have that in our shop. And we'll be offering that in a bundle as well on the crowdfunding because selling that is one way that we've been able to support it. So we sell it to beekeeping stores, individual beekeepers. I originally designed that for myself or from my own. little group of beekeepers to use and ended up putting it online because there weren't that many great physical copies. There still wasn't one that I liked. And so I went made in way in my own.

Now, I think we've sold, I don't know, five or six thousand copies of that. And so we're throwing that into the bundle as well. Now, how do you make your living? It's not getting it from beats warmed. What are you doing? Yeah, this is not my, this is not my real job. I spend so much time on it it might as well be. But this is not my real job. Our team is all volunteer contributors. We have one contractor developer who we pay for some of the really heavy lifting that none of us are able to do, but mostly it's just people who are enthusiastic about the idea.

My actual day job is researching sustainable metal alloys for a startup in California. Sustainable metal. Yeah. It's actually more interesting than I would have thought before doing this. Aluminum is the most recycled material in the world. And most aluminum that's been produced is still in use today. And so there's a lot of easy steps you can do to make things like steel or titanium that are actually quite polluting to make them way more sustainable. So there are some mills that use geothermal energy or they're using recycled metal in their production.

And so providing that to watchmakers, Formula One teams, things like that, wineries for wine tanks, all kinds of things like. that. I have a trivia question. I have a trivia question for you. The top of the Washington monument is made of what? What's the cap? Oh, I'm trying to remember from my high school Washington, D.C. trip. I want to say copper or something like that, bronze maybe. No, it's aluminum. The thing of it was, at the time they did that, it was considered a precious metal. Yeah, yeah. And because I don't know if. I don't know if. if you know my background is I'm a metal analyst too. Really? Okay. I knew. I was head of the Navy's non-destructive testing and inspection program. I didn't know what you did there. Okay. Yeah. And one of

our guys, as soon as he retired, he's afraid of heights. And as soon as he retired, one of his first jobs was to inspect the Washington Monument. And he sent all the stuff on that to us just for fun. Yeah. And a little bit of the interesting material. It is not that easy to make. And so all that The fact that it gets recycled so often has a lot to do with the fact that it's not that easy to make. And so it makes economic sense to recycle all those cans, right? And so it's a really recycled material. Yeah. And I guess a lot of people like to pour it in Ant Hills for some reason.

I've seen that too. Yeah, I haven't gotten into that, into that hobby. But I like all kinds of different stuff. So yeah, that's a very interesting background. I would have thought that you're a code writer or something. Oh, not at all. How did you come up with the skills to put together a website? Well, I studied history and political economics for my bachelor, and so nothing in this direction.

I always like to build things either with my hands, or I like to laser the stamps. I like to design little things, I've been getting into 3D printing, and building custom websites is more and more accessible. And so had some free time on my hands. I had just finished up, actually I just graduated and had some time on my hands and was able to teach myself to use some of these. some of these somewhat easier to use tools to help you build a custom website, right? And so it was really exciting for me to teach myself all of this. Now at this point, things are getting too complicated, right? Some of these predictive tools, data analysis, I'm not good enough at math for this.

And so we have a volunteer data scientist, and her background is an environmental science. We have a GIS volunteers who does like Earth observation and map data. There is so much complexity here that I can, that they have to explain to me that I can kind of barely understand. Yeah. So I sort of reached the limits of what I can do. So you didn't have to learn like WordPress or something. You didn't have to write.

No, the site's too complicated for WordPress, right? So it's built in the low code editor. And so in a tool that makes it a little bit easier. And so I didn't have become a full on coder, but it is custom built, right? So this is not, you can't, you couldn't have built this in WordPress. So it's not a template? No, it's not a template. But I've considered, I've thought about building a plugin for WordPress, which is a

for WordPress, which is not that easy, but building a plugin for WordPress to make it easier for associations to use. But actually the way that we put the form, and a lot of associations too, is one of the worries I hear, right, is kind of the worry that's too technical. But the way that we put this on associations websites

is super simple. It's like a little block of code that you just copy and paste, I send you an email and you copy and paste it into your website. And this works especially really well in, that's why I thought of it, in WordPress sites, and a lot of associations use Wild Apricot. And in both of them, it's really simple.

you just copy and paste this block of code in. And what that basically does is it creates a window in your website into my website. And so you just paste that code there. And I'm able to put your custom reporting form into that window. And so if you need changes made, I can make those changes remotely and fix that for you. It's actually the way that ads get served on the internet. When you see those like annoying sidebar ads, that's the same thing. So it's actually super, super simple to build or to add on to websites.

And so I have a lot of... We just made everyone. so excited about this whole interview. I can't tell you. I'll bet they're just leaning into their computer screens dying to know more about it. Yeah. Well, so I do a lot of calls with associations, too. So if there's worries about the setup, right? I either present to the whole association. There's a recorded presentation on our partnerships page as well of just me giving the whole spiel. Oh, that's cool. But I'm also always happy to, I share my, actually my calendar link is on the website on the partnerships page.

So anyone's welcome to schedule a quick call, and then we can chat about whatever or email since I always like to answer questions and hear feedback, right? All the great ideas that we've built are mostly things that people have suggested. So I'm always looking forward. And I look forward to hearing your listeners and your viewers feedback too. Since the last time that we spoke, I got a bunch of feedback that helped me improve the very early on version of the website. Oh, great.

That's good news. So now when is crowdfunding live? What's the date? Or is it live now? or what's going on? The pre-launch page is live now, so I'll get you the link to that. If you want to share that.

We'll put that down in the video description. And if you're on Podbean or IHeart Radio, it's also going to be in the description there. But do we have a date? More likely than not, by the time your listeners and viewers are listening and watching to this, it'll be live.

Either this Friday or Monday or Tuesday of next week. There's so many different moving parts. I thought this would be easier, to be honest. There's so many moving parts to this. that we're almost there. The end is in sight, but making sure that we launched this successfully is a whole lot of work for our little team.

And I have to say, I, you know, as a beekeeper or somebody that would sign on to a program like that, I wouldn't even mind paying a fee when you do click claim swarm. If that tossed me $5 or something, I mean, does that go against the grain or does that complicate the way you're set up?

Well, so the reason I didn't want to do a price for claiming a swarm or any kind of metered pricing like that, right, where you get like five, you pay for five claims a month or something is that I can't always guarantee that those swarms are going to be great. Like what happens if you pay five bucks for the swarm and then it's gone or it wasn't a swarm or it was something was bad, right? Right. Okay. So the whole goal is not to overcomplicate things. And so what we're moving towards now is offering the sort of a pay what you want subscription. So the beekeepers can opt to pay. a dollar a month or $5 a month, whatever they want, and then they get access to those data tools, right, where they can get it through the lifetime access in the crowdfunding, but not to restrict access to swarms. I considered this. So one thing that some people had suggested was doing priority access for people who paid. And in some areas where there's a lot of beekeepers,

this actually would be a huge advantage, right? If you could pay to get notifications five minutes earlier, you'd be getting way more swarms than everyone else. Yeah, like a first take on it, yeah. Yeah, I wanted to avoid the pay-eepers. to play sort of thing that that causes. And also the goal is to get someone help as fast as possible, right, with the swarm and to get the swarm to a beekeeper as fast as possible. And so if you're doing, if you're first sending that in the first five minutes, sending that only to

a couple of beekeepers who pay and then five minutes later or 15 minutes later, you're sending it to everyone else, then that's time where that swarm, right, that person wasn't getting an answer. And so that seems like it would maybe diminish the service. I thought about charging for text message alerts as well, since those do cost me money for every single text that we send, right, costs a couple, not less than a cent, but it adds up. Right, sending thousands, if not tens of thousands of text adds up. And even there, it's like if we, if we charge for the, for people to get text messages, then maybe fewer people would opt to get text messages.

And then we'd be getting people, or people might be reacting slower over email, right? I didn't want to make, I didn't want to make any of the core features a paid feature right now. it's really only if you want to contribute or if you really are a data nerd and you want to see some of these extra extra data tools that we've worked really hard on. Then we ask for a suggested contribution or a pay what you want subscription, I guess, is what you would call that. But the goal really was to make this financially sustainable to maintain and improve. And at the same time, make it as flexible as possible and make sure that all of the really

core things so that you can get a lot out of this, that all the things are, are free that are actually really useful that you'd really, really want. So the essential. So we talked about the negative. What is the most frequent positive comment you receive about the site? Yeah. I mean, I'm always most flattered when people say they had just this idea, but didn't have time or didn't know how to build it.

That always makes me feel like I'm on the right track. And I get a lot of really nice comments from people who see what we're working on or see what we're building or what we're trying to do. And a lot of this wouldn't have been possible without a lot of really early on support from beekeepers, right, who didn't, right, who either sent a nice message, which powers me and makes me feel good and helps me keep building, but also reached out and volunteered their feedback, their ideas. Some of them volunteered a lot of their time as well, right, to help make it possible. Let's see, the positives, well, I mean, the positives for beekeepers, we've talked about, it's way faster, more private. you're getting some interesting data. You're getting better, more actionable swarm reports, right?

Like you're getting a report that you can actually use because beekeepers all ask the same questions. Like we all ask the same questions, right? If I get a phone call from someone about a swarm or if I see a post from someone, what do I ask them for? Ask them for a picture. Ask them how high up is it? How long have they been there?

Are you sure they're bees, right? So the really basic questions that I ask. And so we make sure to get those to the beekeeper right away so that you can act on that right away. All right. Well, that's all really good stuff. So I think we pretty much. cover the ground. What do you think? Yeah, that's about it. I mean, we've been super busy. Final words or

thoughts or something you want people to know? Oh, I know what I want to know. How are the B numbers out there? What were the losses like among the beekeepers that you know? Yeah, let's see. Me, actually, I had, well, right now only have three colonies. So 100% of the colonies pulled through this year, which is my first time doing that. Actually, overwintered a nucleus colony for the first time, which in California is not that hard, but I've more and more been getting into single brood box, beekeeping, but also keeping nucleus boxes year-round. I know that's maybe a little bit harder for you, Fred.

No, I do it. I do it here. Oh, wow, okay. I miss that video on your channel. We overwinded to the nukebox, but... Yeah, we have snow coming Monday. We're very excited about that, too. It's going to be snow. We can't wait. Yeah, but my neighbor had, I want to say,

60, 70% of his colonies, well, I guess of his four colonies, all the one died, right? And I think the 60% figure nationwide is probably not the case for hobbyists, right? I think it's definitely lower for hobbyists. But beekeepers are seeing really high loss rates this year, right? And so now I'm more, more excited than ever that this is, that swarm is growing and that we're going to have hopefully so many swarms coming through, right? I've done some rough estimates on this, and there are definitely over a couple hundred

thousand swarms in the U.S. every year, right? most of them either happen and nobody notices or they get lost somehow, right? I think a lot about Dr. Seeley's estimate and who knows how accurate this is, right? The state is pretty old and restricted, I guess, the study that he talks about in Honeybee Democracy, but he talks about one in four swarms surviving without a beekeeper. And so I think it's super valuable. I mean, the more swarms that we can get to beekeepers means more of those colonies are surviving. And of course, beekeepers are getting free bees.

And so by, and this is all really rough estimates, but by my estimates, about 30 million honeybees, and this is really, really rough, 30 million honeybees have been reported through Swarmed. And that saved beekeepers over $100,000 in the cost of buying, right, if you buy a package from one of the big retailers, when you extrapolate like the number, right, if you say about 10,000 bees in a package, whatever, you extrapolate that out, it's a couple hundred thousand I think if memory serves that had been saved for beekeepers. Yeah.

So I lost one that we're able to offer that. Yeah, safe to say without swarm collection, a lot of beekeepers would just be out of bee. They wouldn't have any. Yeah, and that really bums me out, right? Seeing posts from beekeepers saying so many colonies this year died that I'm throwing in the towel, right? And so that, I think, is really sad.

And I couldn't imagine quitting beekeeping. And so to think about, like, what, how down someone must be after losing, right, 25 of the 50 colonies or 40 or 50 colonies. Some of these numbers I've been seeing in Facebook posts are insane. And so whatever we can do to get some more bees to beekeepers. I honestly, I have trouble catching swarms through swarmed myself now because there are a couple of beekeepers in my area who act really fast. See how many I'm able to capture this spring.

There have been some reports, but people have beaten me to them. But as long as they're going to someone, I'm happy. as long as we're getting as many storms in as possible and they're all going to beekeepers, then it's a job well done. Yeah. And I think the number is 80% of new beekeepers quit their third year.

Really? Okay. Yeah. And that's just because oftentimes the problems that they're not catching in their colonies build over the seasons. And you could end up with a colony that's at, you know, a critical state of poor health in that third winter.

and that's when that really kind of shows up. And that's of those that actually report it and report the loss. We have a lot of beekeepers in this country that aren't registered anywhere, don't report anything and certainly don't share, but it's over 80% quit that third year. And that would include the people that just have one or two colonies of bees. It wasn't what they thought it would be kind of thing. So it's kind of quitting while they're ahead.

Even though I think a lot of people, right, they get hooked pretty quickly, right? I got started by catching a swarm. So swarms are near and dear to my heart. I think an experience that all beekeepers have too, right, is when you catch a swarm in public, it immediately turns to do a little TED talk about bees. Right, passers-by stop. The homeowner wants to know everything. So I still really like to catch swarms.

I got started catching a swarm and that lit the beekeeping obsession with me. Yeah. And so I still like to do this. And I'm glad that we can now, or make this possible for more beekeepers, right? Get more and more, more, more, to more, right? There's a lot of hobbyists. More and more now we're trying to get some beekeeping professionals to join to because there are a lot of kind of harder removal jobs coming in and want to get those to people.

But it's open to everyone who wants to be catching swarm. And so it's really cool for me to be building a tool for the community and contribute that way. No, it's fantastic. I'm glad you did. I'm all in favor of it. As you already know, that's why we're talking. talking. Yeah, yeah.

Well, so Fred, I have one question for you. Yeah. Will I see you at Epimondia this year? Uh, no. I never, I can't leave my yard. I have, this year I'm focused on video and photography of bees and my shooting list is eight pages long. Wow, okay. I've been contracted to take pictures this year, so that's, I'm going to be focused within 100,

of my where I'm sitting right now. Okay. So I can speak for, I think, all of your viewers when I say we're excited to see the photos and the videos. Because I mentioned it because I'm trying to go to more conferences, right, and meet more beekeepers. And so I was invited to come to Apremondia, meeting a couple different, so actually the thing we didn't talk about, but I'm working with more and more different partners.

All kinds of interesting stuff, right? There's so much, so many interesting projects. I mean, you see all of them, like, come through your studio eventually. But there's so many different projects being done in the beekeeping world. world. And so I've been working online with partners across the U.S., across the world. So I'm looking forward to meeting some of them in person and meeting people who are using Swarmed at some conferences in the U.S. this year. But the next one for me is Appremondia. Are you going to go to the North American Honeybee Expo down in Louisville? Well, I know I can see, I know I can count on seeing you

there. So I think that's always there. I'm always at that one for sure. So good. And hopefully we'll meet in person there. That'll be great. All right. Well, I want to thank you for your time today. and I hope that those listening will definitely follow up on the links down in the video description and certainly support this worthy cause so that we can get the word out and get those bees off those trees and into hives as quick as possible. That's good. I'm going to use that one. Thanks very much, Fred. Always good to talk to you.

And that wraps up another episode of interviews with innovators. I hope you enjoyed learning more about beeswarned.org and how you can help keep it all going. Please don't forget to check the video description for links and other information. If you enjoy this interview and don't want to miss the next one, I invite you to subscribe. I'm Frederick Dunn, and this has been The Way to Be.