How Swarmed Turned Bee Data Into International Media Coverage

When most startups think about international PR, they focus on telling their company story. The start up Swarmed took a different approach.

The platform tracks bee swarms through a network of more than 15,000 beekeepers across North America, Australia, and Europe. Its mission is to protect swarms before they are destroyed while building the most comprehensive dataset on seasonal bee health ever assembled.

At the Philips Innovation Awards, founder Mateo Kaiser connected with Johan Konst. Like many founders, Mateo wasn't a PR expert. He didn't have a large marketing budget or an agency team behind him. What he did have was something much more valuable: unique data.

Together, we looked beyond the company itself and focused on the story hidden inside Swarmed's dataset.

That story became the foundation for an international media campaign.

Finding the PR story in the data

As the 2026 swarm season began, Swarmed's data revealed a striking trend. Bee swarms were appearing significantly earlier than the year before, with the season starting 17 days ahead of 2025. The shift came immediately after one of the worst colony loss years in modern U.S. beekeeping history.

The insight was simple but powerful. The story was that something unusual was happening in nature and Swarmed had the data to prove it.

That transformed the narrative from a company announcement into a news story. Instead of asking journalists to write about a platform, we gave them an opportunity to explore a broader question that affected beekeepers, environmentalists and the public alike:

Why are bees swarming so much earlier than usual?

A simple media strategy

The media outreach followed a few straightforward principles.

Rather than sending long press releases packed with information, pitches were kept short, personal and conversational. The goal wasn't to explain everything at once. It was to spark curiosity.

Instead of attaching the full research upfront, journalists were encouraged to ask for it. That created a natural conversation and increased engagement with the story.

The first publication was offered exclusivity. Once that article was published, the resulting coverage became social proof for every subsequent conversation.

As often happens with strong data-led stories, momentum started to build quickly.

From one article to international coverage

The first breakthrough came when The Guardian published the story in May 2026.

From there, other publications followed.

The LA Times explored the implications of the unusually early swarm season. The New York Times reported on the downstream effects, covering how the earlier swarm season was leading to more human encounters with aggressive Africanized honey bees in the southern United States, including a widely discussed piece on surviving a bee attack. NPR covered the research around World Bee Day. Regional outlets such as the Philadelphia Inquirer added local angles.

What began as a niche dataset collected by a startup evolved into an international conversation about pollinator health, environmental change and the future of beekeeping.

The story resonated because it connected a specific piece of data to a much larger issue.

Beyond media coverage

The impact extended beyond traditional news outlets.

The story gained significant traction within online beekeeping communities, particularly on Reddit, where hobbyist and professional beekeepers discussed the findings and shared their own observations. For a platform built around real-time swarm tracking, those conversations generated valuable traffic, engagement and backlinks.

The coverage also created long-term visibility in an increasingly AI-driven search landscape.

When research is cited by trusted publications and discussed across online communities, it becomes part of the information ecosystem that powers tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. As a result, people searching for answers about early bee swarms or colony losses are increasingly likely to encounter insights that originated from Swarmed's data.

For a company whose value is built on collecting and interpreting real-world information, that visibility compounds over time.

What this teaches us about modern PR

Founder Mateo didn't have a PR background.

What he had was a mission worth talking about, unique data and the willingness to approach journalists with a genuine story rather than a company announcement.

The success of the campaign wasn't driven by a large budget or a complex PR strategy. It came from identifying a newsworthy insight, packaging it in a way journalists could immediately understand and letting the story speak for itself.

In a media landscape saturated with product launches and funding announcements, the strongest stories are often hiding in the data companies already have.

Swarmed is proof of that.

"I had tried doing PR before, doing paid press releases, responding to pitch requests, but nothing really worked. Johan got me thinking about what made my company newsworthy and how to pitch the right angle to the right journalists. Once The Guardian published, everything else followed."

— Mateo Kaiser, Founder of Swarmed

Results in New York Times and the Guardian

6 national and international publications
Coverage in The Guardian, New York Times, NPR and LA Times
Organic Reddit traction
Dozens of high-authority backlinks
AI-search visibility through earned media citations

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