BRAINY beekeepers who have lost seven swarms in the past 18 months have invented an app to help corral colonies.

Norman Guiver and Louis Bennett's Bee.Watch app allows beekeepers, farmers and even local councils to let each other know when they find a stray swarm causing chaos in a car park or chilling out on a chimney.

The hope is that the app will save dozens of frantic phone calls by tapping into the honey hive mind to find a beekeeper willing to come and collect the colony.

But the apiary app also lets farmers and golf course owners let local keepers know when they use pesticides.

This is particularly pertinent as the dynamic duo – who make and sell honey as a hobby on the side of running security software company uWatch in Cholsey – fear that pesticides may have killed off some or all of the swarms they have lost.

Mr Bennett, 22, explained: "It started in April: we went out and found a pile of a couple of thousand dead bees in front of a hive.

"We assumed some of them had gone out to a field, picked up pesticides and brought them back.

"It could also have been a virus, but we just don't know."

Even a couple of thousand dead bees is only a fraction of a whole colony, which means the rest of that swarm – and the other six they have lost since – are probably still out there somewhere.

Honeybees regularly leave their hive and swarm as part of their natural behaviour, but in the human world this can regularly result in colonies descending in inconvenient places.

In June last year, a swarm of some 10,000 bees caused alarm when they landed on the shopping trolleys outside a Sainsbury's supermarket in Bicester.

In July 2016 a similar swarm prompted panic by flying around Witney's Woolgate shopping centre.

Normally in these circumstances, the local council would send out an environmental officer who would try to calm the situation and then call the local beekeeping association, who then start phoning their members until they find someone free and willing to come and bundle the bees in a bag.

With the Bee.Watch app, a council officer can simply take a photo of the swarm then create an apiary alert with the location which all beekeepers in the area can see.

The app creators are now in talks with Oxford City Council about a contract, and after launching in March already have six beekeeping associations around the country and four farmers in Oxfordshire signed up.

Mr Bennett added: "The council are really enthusiastic about this: they can just take a picture of a swarm, put in the GPS location with contact details then send that out to every single swarm collector in the surrounding area.

"They were almost blown away by how comprehensive the technology is."

A Bee.Watch subscription currently costs £12.

To find out more go to www.bee.watch