🐝 How To Keep Bees Without Making Splits - Episode 5 - The Double Demaree Swarm Control System
Laurence Edwards demonstrates the double Demaree technique to prevent swarming. He isolates the queen on one frame, moves brood boxes above a queen excluder, and creates a new box below. The colony thinks it has swarmed, triggering emergency queen cells that must be removed within seven days. Done right, it buys five to six weeks of swarm control through peak season.
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Right, it's late in the evening. We're back at the colony that we're trying to not make it swarm, doing everything we possibly can. At the moment, it's on 2 supers, National Deep, 14 by 12. Couldn't be messier, I know, but these are just the boxes I've got. What I'm going to do today, if the bees will let me, because it is cold and there are a couple of really horrible colonies in this apiary that are just chasing me around, is I'm going to do a double Demaray manipulation, put a queen excluder in. So what that means is I'm going to take my 14 by 12 box at the bottom, which that's got brood in it. I'm going to take my National Deep just above that that's got brood in it. I'm going to lift both of those boxes to the top. I'm going to take a single frame of brood with the queen, put 2 new brood boxes underneath, and I'm going to make sure that the queen is then underneath the queen excluder for both of those boxes that I'm putting in. Sounds extreme, it is extreme, but it's a really, really good method to trick the bees into thinking that they've swarmed. Now you might be following along with this and thinking this is getting a little bit out of hand, the colony is going to be really tall. What I'm going to do with this is I'm going to start Recycling those boxes, so I'm not going to use both of those boxes to gather honey. And if you're doing this on a single colony, so just use the manipulation with a single box. It will all become clear when I get inside. I'll do a quick inspection as well just to check the bees, make sure they're not actually preparing to swarm at the moment, and then we can do that manipulation, which means the box is going to end up kind of somewhere up there. But it is a really good way to stop the bees swarming. Right, so at least the colony of bees in here, they're not too bad. Somewhere over there is the nastiest colony of bees. I think I know which one it is, and I would definitely Sort it out. But let's get in here though. See if we can find the queen. Do a quick inspection. Hopefully there's no swarm preps going on, and I've timed it right. And then we should be on for an absolutely bumper crop of honey. Hopefully we won't get any swarms leaving this colony. Right. Well, that took me ages. I finally found the queen. She was knocking around up in the supers. You know, there's no queen excluders here. So what I'm going to do? So I'm going to get my trap out. I want to trap that queen, put her off to one side because that is really important. You need to find the queen if you're going to do this manipulation. Just look how many bees are in this colony, and this is what you do if you do your inspections at 7 PM at night when all of the bees are sitting there in the colony. So I'm not too worried about the temperament. You'll see later on in this video, I'll come back maybe midday when it's 25 degrees, and these will be really nice calm bees. I'm going to put everything back together again now and show you a very, very effective way to stop your bees swarming or to make them think that they've already swarmed. Right, so what I've got here is I've got 2 brood boxes. You can do this with foundation, you can do it with drawn comb, you can do it with a mix of the two. I would say if you're going for ultimate not wanting them to swarm, do it with foundation. I'm doing it with a little bit of a mix of the two though. So I've got my queen over to one side, so this manipulation becomes a lot easier now. I can take the National Deep off, pop that over there. I can take my 14 by 12 off, pop that over there as well. Then I take my new National Deep, just a new empty box with a mixture of foundation and frames, take out one Single frame, pop that off to one side. I've then gone through and found the correct size frame and the best frame of emerging brood. That's what I always like to go for, one single frame of emerging brood. I'm gonna place that in the center like that. I'm then gonna take my queen, and if you're not comfortable picking up a queen, just shake her in. If you're comfortable picking up the queen, just pick her up like that and just place her on the frame. Right, she's gone down. Give it a shake of bees, and then all we're doing is we're just building everything back up. Right, so what have we got now? We've got a bottom box that's a national deep box, mixture of frames and foundation, single frame of brood and the queen. Another national deep box here, that's a mixture of frames and foundation. Then we're going to introduce a queen excluder. And if you're doing a Demerara split, you do need to put a queen excluder in there. Queen excluder goes on next. Then we go straight back on with our supers. That's the super frame that was missing. Then you want to take your 2 brood boxes and put them on the top. So a little bit of heavy lifting here. That is as tall as we're going, and that's the manipulation complete. Started off saying, yeah, what a nice friendly colony, and they're not bad, this colony. It's another one in this apiary that's really bad. These are just flying. Wrong time of the day, wrong weather. Let's summarize what we've done though. I know there was no queen excluder originally. The majority of the brood was in 14 by 12 box and my National Deep box. Loads of bees in the supers. What we've done, starting from the bottom, we've got a new National Deep that has got the queen inside it on a single frame of emerging brood. Rest of the box is filled with foundation and drawn comb. I've got another box on top of that, National Deep, nothing in it, just frames of foundation, frames of drawn comb. I've then inserted a queen excluder. Then I've got my 2 supers, my National Deep worth of brood and my 14 by 12 worth of brood. The bees will think they've swarmed. At least the queen and the bees around her will think they've swarmed because there's no brood down there. They're going to be very, very confused. The distance between the queen and this brood up here is going to mean that you're going to get emergency cells knocking up all over the place. Now you need to take warning of this one. If you don't come back in 7 days and knock down all of those emergency cells, the colony will almost certainly swarm. We'll cover that in the next part of this video, but when we come back and knock down all of those cells, the colony is going to be in such a good state. We're going to have a fresh double brood area, loads of space for that queen to lay. We're going to have lots of space within the colony, so they're not going to swarm through being restricted. And this is going to probably buy us maybe 5 or 6 weeks. This manipulation is going to get us through from the first week in May past into the middle back end of June. That is the real high-risk swarming period. If I can get my bees, this colony here, through to the 1st of July, I'm almost certain they're not going to swarm, and I can probably do that without doing any further inspections post the beginning of July. We'll cover all that in this video though. That's the hard bit out of the way. We've done a double Demerace split on this colony. If we keep these bees here, we are going to be in for such a huge amount of honey.
