Queen Right

Every beekeeping app in the store is a diary you fill in after the inspection. Queen Right does the opposite. It runs each colony's brood cycle forward from what you last saw inside and names the days that colony is likely to swarm. Change anything on the board and it recomputes. Which hive is about to swarm? Open the apiary and the hives are tinted by risk — calm colonies sit grey, one building toward a swarm warms toward red. Tap it to see the projection: the swarm window in days, driven by how much room the queen has left to lay. Will adding a super stop them? Usually not, and the app shows you why instead of just saying so. Bees swarm for room to lay, not room to store. A super is honey space; it barely touches the laying room that drives swarming. Add one on the board and the risk holds — the misconception, corrected on screen. I found queen cells. How long do I have? It depends on the stage, and Queen Right reads all three. Empty cups start no clock; a colony makes play cups all the time. A charged cell with an egg or larva opens a window of several days. A capped queen cell means today or tomorrow, because the prime swarm leaves as the first cell is sealed. The clock from an observed cell overrides everything else. How does it know my queen's laying rate? It measures it. Photograph a brood frame and Queen Right squares the frame up from its edges, you paint over the sealed brood with a finger, and the area converts to actual cells. After a few inspections it's projecting on your queen's own rate, not a textbook average. What actually reduces the risk? Adding drawn comb or a brood box gives laying room; swapping sealed brood out for drawn comb frees cells the same day; a split resets both halves. Cutting queen cells on its own does not clear the risk, and the app tells you the cells will be back within a week if the cause is left untouched. Does the weather matter? It does. A congested colony rained in for a week swarms on the first warm afternoon. Queen Right pulls forage conditions for your apiary and factors the return of a flow into the timing. A few honest limits. This is a model, and it's only as good as the last time you looked inside — leave it nine days and it says as much. It predicts swarming; it does not diagnose disease. And it needs an account, because an apiary is usually worked by more than one person and the laying rate it learns for each queen should follow you, not a single phone.