0:04 Welcome back to HiveQ. In this video, we're going to talk about the best technique in beekeeping, the Demaray split. So I absolutely love this technique. I've been using it for years. It is an effective and efficient technique that is easily repeatable, that brings about a huge amount of benefits to the bees and the beekeeper. So what is the Demaray method? The Demeray method is a technique to fool your bees to think that they have swarmed. It is effectively an artificial swarm technique, but it is a vertical technique as opposed to a horizontal. If you've got a single beehive, you go inside, you find swarm cells, the general advice is to split the hive into 2 using a process called the artificial swarm. You need a new brood box, you need a new floor, you need a new roof, you need a new feeder, you need a new beehive. And okay, when you're starting out in beekeeping, it's not the end of the world from going from 1 to 2 or 2 to 4. If you've got 200 colonies and every single one them tries to swarm, going from 200 to 400 is very, very difficult and very, very expensive. We need a system to stop that split, and that system is called the Demaray. So the Demaray method is a swarm prevention technique. It is a preemptive technique. Lots of people get this wrong with the Demaray method. If you go into a colony and you see any signs of charged swarm cells, cannot do the Demaray. It is too late. Demaray is a preemptive manipulation that is used to trick the bees into thinking that they have swarmed. But it is used before the bees are actually ready to even think about that themselves. You think I'm doubling down on it? I'm trebling down on it. The Demaray method only works if the bees are not ready to swarm yet. So the Demaray method gives the bees the impression, the illusion that there is a separation between 2 parts of the colony. You have the queen downstairs and you have all of the brood upstairs, and they're separated by some boxes in the middle. Of course, we'll go into great detail into how to set that up, but it's that false illusion and that separation between the queen and the brood that tricks the bees into not swarming. But the huge benefit with the Demaray method is that it is not a horizontal split. It's not one beehive turning into 2 beehives. It's just a single beehive that you work upwards in a vertical fashion and you trick the bees that way. It's one floor, it's one roof. The only thing that you need in order to do a Demaray split is an additional brood box full of frames. So when do we use the Demaray method? We said previously the reason that I use it is as a swarm prevention or a swarm minimization tactic. So for me, I'm doing it preemptively before swarming Naturally triggered. Now this is dependent on where you are in the UK or dependent on where you are in the world, and you'll only really get this through trial and error. But for me in North Wales, I know that towards the end of April, early May, in an average season, my bees are going to start swarming. So the time that I go in and do this Demaray method is around early May, something like that. It might be late April one year, it might be the middle of May one year. I move it around to suit the conditions and also to suit what the bees are telling me. If I have swarm cells popping up on all my colonies in the middle of April, I know that I've missed it and I've got an unusually early season. And then I can go ahead on the other colonies that have not started creating swarm cells, start to do this technique. So you need to fine-tune it yourself, but anytime from kind of like the middle of April through to the back end of May, it's a good time to do a Demaray. Now, how many times should you do a Demaray in a season? You can repeat the process with a Demaray and do it like 2 or 3 times in a season, but it can get a little bit complicated and it can introduce more lifting than is actually required. And sometimes it can confuse things for the bees as So for me, I'll do at least one demeray per season, and if I can get away with just doing one, I will leave it at one. Possibly after the June gap, I'll do a second one as well, depending on the configuration that I've gone into in the June gap. And if I've not covered it before, the June gap is just a gap in between the spring flow and the summer flow, potentially a few days around June, but could be back end of May, where there isn't really much going on for nectar or pollen for the bees. But I like to try and just do it once a year in early May, And it sets the bees up for the rest of the season. So how do you complete the Demaray method? Now I've done a number of different videos talking about the Demaray. I've done instructional ones showing you how to do it. I've done a couple of feature-length ones as well showing it all the way throughout the season. And I will take all of those videos and I will stick them below in the description so you can watch all of those and they're all nicely collated together for you. But in this video, I just wanted to break it down with some graphics and some information to show you how that Demaray system works. So the prerequisite for doing a Demaray is as follows. Your brood box should be pretty much full of bees. You need to have a mated queen in there. She needs to be healthy. She needs to be laying. Have a queen excluder above the brood box and then 2 supers as a minimum above that queen excluder, pretty much full of bees. Do not do this with just a brood box and then 2 empty supers. Does not work. And there is a risk that if you take all of the brood off at the top and there's not enough bees to connect the 2 together, you end up with a real mess and you set your colony So as long as you've got those prerequisites in place, you've got the brood box pretty much full of bees, you've got a queen that is laying, queen excluder on top, and then about 2 supers full of bees above itâ you can do it with 3 supers, you can do it with 4 supers, you just need that minimum of 2 supers-ish of beesâ then this is the process. This is how you do a Demerara split. You take an additional brood box of frames of foundation, you place that off to one side. You take the original brood box that is on the beehive and you lift it up to the top of the beehive here. You take the new box with frames and foundation and you place that on the bottom. So this is the new setup now. So we'll have the floor at the bottom, the next box above the floor is the brand new brood box full of frames and foundation. We then have our queen excluder, we then have our 2 supers full of bees, and then on top of the supers of bees we place our original brood box that is full to the brim with brood and bees and the queen. Before we place that brood box at the top, we need to go through that box, identify where the queen is, and take out a frame with the queen on that has some capped worker brood on it. You're going to take that frame out from the top and you're going to place it down into the bottom box. You're going to take one frame of foundation out of that bottom box, fill that slot in at the top. This is what it should look like now. You have the floor at the bottom, that's completely unchanged. You have your first brood box here full with frames and foundation. But there is one frame in there that has a frame of bees, fully capped brood, and your queen bee. Queen excluded goes on top of that. Then you have your super full of bees, another super full of bees, and then all of the brood at the top up there. And then one frame of foundation just to fill in all of those gaps. That's the manipulation complete. It is super simple. You just need that brood box with the frames of foundation. Very, very quick to complete. The next thing that you need to do is after 8 days, you come back and do another inspection. In that top box, because you've got open brood that is so distanced away from the queen, may create emergency cells. If they do create emergency cells, you go to that top box, you shake all of the bees off, you take down all of the emergency cells, and you do nothing. In the meantime, the queen downstairs is thinking, this is nice, we've swarmed. We've definitely swarmed because all of this foundation here is brand new. This is not the brood box that we live in. And the colony is tricked into thinking that downstairs portion has actually gone off and swarmed. The queen takes it upon herself to build out a brand new colony down there. The bees are drawing out the wax, the queen's laying it up, eggs turn into larvae, capped over. The colony is building out down there, and at the same time, all of the brood at the top is emerging with nice young bees, and they're filtering down to the bottom down here. Once all of that brood at the top box has emerged, if you time it perfectly and you go in and all of the brood has emerged and there's nothing in the frames, you can just remove that box completely. What you're more likely to find though is that you go back in and the bees have filled it with loads of nectar, and you want to make use of that nectar. So in order to get everything back on track and back to where you were at the beginning, this is kind of the reset to get everything where it needs to You take that brood box back from the top that's got open nectar in it, you place it right down at the bottom, and you add more space above in the form of supers. So this is the revised format after about 3 weeks. You've got your brood box that is now just full of nectar, then you've got your next brood box that's got the queen with all of the brood in, then your queen excluder, then your 2 supers of bees, and at that point I'll chuck on another couple of supers as well. Having brood here and nectar here is not what bees like. It opens them up to robbing. So as long as the stores there is open, What's that? and not capped, the bees will just move it up through and store it in the supers. If they do not do that, use the technique of checkerboarding that we learned earlier, which means placing those frames of open capped stores in between brood, and the bees will move everything back up. Once they've cleared out all of those frames, remove that box. If you want to go best practice, you can add another queen excluder in there. The risk that you have is that the queen's going to come from this box up here and start laying back down there. So if you want a bulletproof method, I would go floor, box with nectar, Queen excluder, box with bees and queen and brood, queen excluder. Super, super, super, super, super. That is the Demaray technique. And during that process, so long as you take down all of the emergency cells and the bees had not started swarm preps before you started doing it, bees will not swarm. You only get like a 3-week reprieve though. It doesn't last any longer than that. And then as that colony starts to build back up again, they are at risk of swarming. So depending on when you do it, you can re- Do that cycle again. Once you've taken that bottom box away, you are in exactly the same configuration: floor, brood box full of bees and a queen, queen excluder, a load of supers. You can do the Demaray again. You just keep on doing it. You can do 2 or 3 Demarays in a season, absolutely no problem. But like I say, just to keep it simple, I try and do one in the spring, get to the June gap, and then if I need to do another one in the summer, I can do it then. Take your time to look at this process and see if it's something that would suit What you end up doing during the DemarĂ©e is carrying a lot of very, very heavy boxes. You end up picking those boxes up and lifting them up high. So if you're struggling to lift like a super of honey, the DemarĂ©e really isn't going to work for you. There's quite a lot of lifting and it's quite high lifting. So although it seems like a very, very good technique and you would like to use it, if you can't lift those boxes, you might need to go down another route. Another slight downside with the DemarĂ©e is it does work the queens very, very hard. So a very well-mated queen can last for maybe kind of like 3 or 4 years, but a demeray would definitely reduce that down. And I'd be surprised if you're consistently demeraying your colonies that you get longer than 2 years out of a queen. However, what you get in return for that is a significant boost in the number of bees that are available in the season, and that generally, depending on the weather, results in a much more substantial honey crop. The demeray method for me serves 2 major purposes. It makes my life much easier because I don't need to treat each colony as an individual. I can just demerit an entire apiary at once. It buys me a little bit of time. I don't have to consistently split my colonies, so I'm not always filling up the spare boxes that I have. And the best one for me is it dramatically improves your honey crop if you time it correctly. You want the honey flow to start or to be at its strongest around 3 weeks after you do the demerit. That is when you're gonna have the biggest population of bees to take advantage of that flow. I love the demerit split. I'm gonna put so much information at the bottom of this video here. The text description will include all of the links to any videos that I've done about the demerit. To give you a really nice video showing you every single step of the method.
