How To Maximise Your Honey Harvest | Proven Methods for Bigger Honey Yields

Today I'm going to show you how to do a preemptive vertical split called a demarée. Now there are loads of different iterations and versions of demarées, and this is just the way that I do it, so I welcome your comments. If you do this a slightly different way, fair enough. This is just my method to work and to coincide with my 7-day inspections. And what's different about this method of artificial swarm control is that you don't need to wait until you see swarm cells. So I do demerays all the time when I see swarm cells, but you can also do what's called a preemptive demeray. That's what I call it anyway. And what you're doing there is when you identify a really big, strong colony, you do the artificial swarm before they start to make swarm preparations. And we'll cover all of the details in this video. And as always with these videos, I'm not just going to show you the manipulation and then let you go off and try it yourselves and not show you the ending. In this video, I'm going to show you the manipulation today. I'll cut to 7 days later, I'll show you the next step of the manipulation, and then I'll give you a further update on this video. So make sure you stay to the very end of the video to see how big and strong this colony becomes, because this method of artificial swarm control gives you 2 really big benefits. One is you don't need to wait for them to swarm, so you're not time-bound and you're not waiting for the colonies all to swarm and they all do it at the same time and it's pandemonium. The second one though is that it's a vertical split, and I love vertical splits because it means you don't need an additional floor, you don't need an additional roof. More importantly than all of that though is that honey production isn't sacrificed. If anything, is boosted quite significantly. So I'm going to run through all of the details on this video. It is the easiest method in the world though, so follow all the steps, stay tuned to the end of the video, and you'll see how to prevent your bees from swarming but also boost honey production at the Right, so what we have here is a really, really strong colony, and you might notice the lack of a queen excluder here. So this is a double brood colony, and I've picked this colony specifically to show you because you can do it with a double brood as well. There's a bit more lifting involved, but it doesn't matter whether you're on single brood, double brood, the same thing applies. So for the purpose of this video, we'll do it on a double brood. If you're on a single brood, follow exactly the same process. There is no difference. So what you need to do first is you need to go through the colony and confirm there are no swarm cells. Don't just do this thinking, ah, there's no swarm cells, I'm just going to do it anyway. Just confirm, go through every single frame checking, make sure there's no swarm cells. Then the next thing you need to do is pick up the entire brood box. Doesn't matter whether it's a single brood box, double brood box, pick up everything barring the floor. Go and move it somewhere else. So then you're left with something like this, which is just an empty floor and all the bees thinking, where's my beehive gone? Then you want to take a box. Again, doesn't matter what size this is, obviously not like a super, so not a National Shallow. You want to take, in this instance, a 14 by 12. You want to take a box, preferably of foundation, but if you've got some drawn comb in there, it doesn't matter. You don't want a box of stores down there. The aim of this manipulation is to give the colony Space. Give that queen space to lay because it slows down the swarm preparation. So get a nice box. I would say if you're doing this, you're going to make a choice, go for a box of foundation. New foundation works really well. Put that on the floor. So then you want to take out your middle frame from this box down here, and as you can see, this has got a bit of drawn foundation on it. Got a mixture in here, so this is a mixture of foundation and drawn comb. Take out the middle frame, you want to leave a gap in the middle. Then what you need to do is you need to hunt through, if you're on double brood, all of your frames, or if you're on single brood, just go through the brood box and you want to find a single frame with capped brood with the queen on. So if the queen's not on that frame, just pick her up, pop her on that frame. Works best if it's capped brood downstairs. So down there in that gap, we want one frame with the queen, no queen cells. So there you go, I've found my queen. A little bit of pandemonium, it's quite a disruptive manipulation this, but they all settle down. There's my queen and she's on the wrong frame, so I'm just going to pick her up and put her onto the frame that I want her on. So when you're picking them up, make sure you've got nice tight gloves on. Now before she goes and legs it somewhere else, quite a, quite a quick queen this one, I'm going to take this frame. So remember this frame here, a frame of capped Brood. Doesn't matter if there's some eggs or emerging brood in there as well. Just works better, I think, if you have emerging brood. I've got the queen on the frame and there's definitely no queen cells on this frame. I'm gonna place that into the gap that we made in that new box. Right, so you've got the queen on that frame in your new box. That will attract all of the bees back to there. No problem whatsoever. So then it's all about how you build this back up and what you do need. You don't need another roof, you don't need another floor, You need a couple of supers, some way of putting some distance between this box here and what's above, and an additional queen excluder. So the first thing you want to put on is a queen excluder. So this is just an existing super. This was on top of the colony at the beginning. What you want to do now is take any supers that you've got and put them on that queen excluder. You then want to take another super, and it doesn't matter if this is drawn comb or foundation, both work well, mixture of the two, whatever. You just want another box there. What you're trying to do is put some distance between where the queen is and where you're going to put the brood area. So another super goes on top. Then what you need is another queen excluder. So at the moment we've got brood box with foundation in, one frame with a queen, no queen cells, One queen excluder, the original super, an empty super, then a queen excluder. And then you want to put the original brood boxes on top, and you'll see it becomes quite a tower when you're doing this double brood. And then final piece of the jigsaw, put your crown board on. Obviously I use my feeders as crown boards, empty feeder, That goes on the top, and then you can place your roof back on. So it's taller than me now. Really, really big, massive colony. So there you go, that's it. How crazy does this look? It looks like a real faff, but this is so simple. So what we've got here is we've got a new brood box full of foundation, one frame of brood, no queen cells, and the original queen. Queen excluder, the old super from Full of stores, or it can be a new super, and then you've got another new super. So I say a good distance there, minimum 2 supers. I've got 2 brood boxes here. Then we've got another queen excluder, the original brood box, and then the original second brood box. So if you're doing it double brood, you'll have 2 brood boxes. If you're doing it single brood, you just have 1 brood box. And then I've got my crown board or feeder, and then you've got the roof. Now you might be thinking I've not really explained what's going on here, so I'll give you a little bit of a background as to what's going on here. In the season, colonies will swarm because it's their way of reproducing. They also swarm because they don't have enough space. So just because you've done this doesn't mean your colony's not going to swarm. You're ticking off the box of giving them sufficient space. You've now got a queen down there who has got sufficient space to lay. All of the bees are going to come back in through that entrance. They're going to see their queen. They're going to cluster around her. They're going to build a new brood nest Downstairs. This brood nest up here is so far away from the queen, they are going to think we are queenless. So this brood box here is going to be exactly the same as if you just went and killed your queen or you took your queen away. They are going to draw emergency queen cells all over this box, left, right, and center. We're probably going to get 50 or 60 queen cells. Make sure you stay tuned to this video. We're going to cut back here in a week and I'm going to show you the status of this top box I'm going to show you the status of this bottom box. Bottom box, I'm expecting them to have drawn out some foundation, got some nice brood in all stages, queen's still there, no queen cells, and some eggs. Top 2 boxes, we're not going to see any eggs up there. We're almost certainly going to find lots and lots of emergency cells. What we're going to do with those emergency cells is we'll go through each and every individual frame, shake the bees off, kill all of those emergency And in this video again, we're going to fast forward another week or two, and I'm going to show you the status of all of these boxes. And what's going to happen is brood from up here is going to emerge. You're going to get young bees. They're going to say, where are all the eggs? They're going to be drawn down to the brood nest down there where all the eggs are. The worker bees will realize there's space up here, and they will start bringing the nectar And the honey upwards. So it might seem like chaos at the moment because you've got your brood all up here, honey down here, and nothing really in that box barring one frame of brood and the queen. Fast forward six weeks, all of that brood's going to have emerged. We're going to knock down all the queen cells. We're going to have loads of honey up here, probably honey there, and we're going to have a brood box full of brood. That is how you do a preemptive demerite artificial split. But like I say, don't stop watching the video there. Follow this through right through to the end. Going to give you loads of different updates all the way through this video so you can see, A, how effective it is at stopping the colony swarming, and B, how good it is for honey production as well. Word of warning though, if you miss any queen cells, emergency cells in this box up here, if you miss just one, you'll almost certainly make the colony swarm. So you're walking a bit of a tightrope here in that you're doing a preemptive demaray to stop them swarming. If you don't do it perfectly, chances are they will swarm as well. I do this on loads of my colonies though, and this is what I'm going to try and do on the heather this year. I'm going to run all of my colonies like that. I'm going to see if we can get some really mega honey crops. So I'll fast forward a week and I'll show you the status of all of these boxes. Right, so it's been 1 week since we did our preemptive demaray. What we're expecting to see is bees down in the original brood box. They're going to be expanding that brood nest around the queen. We're expecting to see bees hopefully in these middle boxes as well, probably nowhere near as many though. And then up here in the 2 original brood boxes, we're going to find lots of bees, lots of queen cells. And what you need to do a week later to ensure this colony doesn't swarm, go through Every single frame in the upstairs brood boxes, shake off all the bees, kill every single queen cell. Do not miss a queen cell. I know I go on about this, and I've said this loads of times already in the video. If you miss one queen cell, this colony will swarm, and you'll lose half your bees. So I've given them a puff of smoke. It's not the best weather here today, so the bees are going to be all over the place again. Quite a disruptive day today for the bees because we're going to be shaking off. 22 frames of brood and a lot of bees, but it's for the greater good, and it means that you keep all of your bees in this hive as opposed to them going and swarming into someone's chimney. So we'll get inside. I'm going to work from the bottom to the top, right? We won't work top to bottom because I've run out of space, so we're going to work from the 2 middle supers, so the area that shouldn't have any brood or any queen inside. So we're going to work from this box first and then go down We'll take a look at the boxes that way around. So this is the upper of the 2 supers that are national deeps, and as you can see, not that many bees. Now I've just given them a puff of smoke to get them down, but there are bees in here. Now I've done this manipulation a few times and they're literally empty, these 2 boxes, and that's not the end of the world, but it's good to see a few bees in here. You don't want to give them too, too much space. So that's what that box looks like. And obviously this was just drawn comb and foundation. There's no queen in there, there was no brood in there, so there's no action that's needed to be taken on this box. Now there's quite a lot of weight in this box, which is— it just goes to show how good— I told you this was a manipulation to maximize honey, and already that is probably half full. So I'll show you a couple of those frames now, pull them out. The bees will stuff those 2 middle boxes with honey because that's where they think it should go. So then we move on to the second box, and this is the box, the super, directly above the original brood box. Make sure I get that one right. This is the one that you would expect quite a lot of honey to be in. This is where they're going to pack it because this is the closest place to the entrance that isn't a brood nest to them, isn't somewhere where there is a queen. And as you can see, it's pretty much full with bees. Not entirely full with bees, but there's a lot of bees down here. And I don't know about you, but I can tell just from the way that there's a little bit of white cappings on the top there, there's going to be a really nice amount of weight to that box and the frames are going to be full of honey. So I'll pull out a couple of frames on this one as well and show you the honey that's been stored. So there you go, that's the middle frame taken out of the super directly above the bottom brood box. Repairing a bit of wax there, putting some drone comb in, lots of nice open honey in the corners there. Really nice smell, and then they're starting to cap that off. So the bees doing what they do best, storing that surplus. This is a really, really heavy box of honey. This is genuinely a backbreaking box. I reckon that's a good 30-35 pounds of honey in the super above the first brood box down on the floor. So these boxes can be reversed now, it doesn't matter which way you stack them. I'm just going to stack it on that box there. It's getting a little bit heavy. Now I'm going to leave that little bit in, so excuse if there's any poor editing there. Just a word of caution here, yeah, you're working with lots of boxes. They're very tall, they're taller than me, they're heavy, and now they're top-heavy as well because I've just put honey supers on there. So okay, it might be a little bit lazy, I should be moving them around, but it's a word of caution for you. You're working with big heavy boxes full of bees, full of honey. Stack them so they're stable and they don't fall down. These boxes can break really easy, and the worst thing that happens is that you, you drop it and you lose the queen. So just make sure when you're stacking them, they're stacked nice and stable. Right, so now we're going to take a look into the original brood box. So if you remember from last week, this is where we took the single frame of capped brood with one queen, the only queen in the colony, on it, and everything else was either drawn comb or just foundation. And what we're expecting to see in this box is a box full of bees. Like, the bees come in, that is where they think the brood nest is. They think, what's gone on here? This is crazy. We need to build a new brood nest here. So they're going to be using those flows to expand that brood nest, draw any foundation if it's needed, say to the queen, lay, lay, lay, you're way behind, you've only got one frame here. Turbocharges that queen. So I'll show you that now. And as you can see, it's jam-packed full of bees. And what's really interesting is how much they've expanded that. So I'll get in there, I'll take a look, see how many frames of eggs we can see. So this is the original brood nest. One frame of brood, one queen, frames of foundation, frames of drawn comb, and now it is full to the brim with bees again. And there'll be an emerging brood nest which we'll take a look in now. So here is my original frame of brood that I put in there. And as you can see, there's the queen. So we've still got a queen. They've not swarmed yet. We're doing something right. And as you can see, you can see in there she's laying that up nicely. Loads of eggs, loads of larvae. I know it's always difficult to see on the camera like this, but believe me, there are eggs, there are larvae in all of those cells there. She's doing the job. So then this is what you should expect to see on the remainder of the frames in here. And depending on how strong the colony is, Well, you will see the progress that they make within a week, but they've drawn out all of that comb. That was a foundation, or mostly foundation, and then she has laid it up with eggs. So you can see eggs in all of those cells there, really nice pattern. And that's what they're doing, they're busy expanding the brood nest downstairs. Now I won't go through all the frames down in that bottom brood nest for you because there's really not that much to see. She's on about 6 frames of eggs down there, which is remarkable really considering that's one week for her to go and for them to repair and draw foundation and for her to lay all of those eggs. You don't need to do any swarm checking in this box apart from the one frame of brood that you put in there. They don't have the resources to start doing queen cells in any of the other frames yet, but going forward you will need to go back and start doing that on a weekly basis and do your normal weekly swarm checks in this box down here. So we've got a brood box full of bees. We've got one queen down there, got a frame of capped brood that's mostly emerged now, and then we've got 6 frames of eggs and a really strong, vibrant, emerging brood nest. We're finished downstairs for this week. So it's really, really simple manipulation here, and I hope you can start to see why it works so well, because downstairs all they're interested in doing is laying eggs, getting the queen to lay eggs, giving the queen the resources that she needs To rear brood. So you're going to see a little bit of nectar down there, you're going to see lots of frames being repaired, you're going to see nice pollen frames, you're going to see eggs and brood in all stages, and you're going to see the queen. Hopefully no queen cells. That's what you'd expect to see in, in a brood box at any time of the year. Put our queen excluder back on now. Then the 2 boxes that are going back on now, these are the original 2 supers. You've got your brood box at the bottom, queen excluder, and then the 2 supers. That's what these 2 boxes are. The bees come into the colony and they think this is the brood nest downstairs. Don't store copious amounts of nectar down there. We store nectar and honey at the top. We store eggs and rear brood downstairs. So they're doing the job well and they're storing it here. Now the question with this manipulation comes in is that they should be storing it at the top, but at the moment the top is full of frames of brood. Because we put all the frames of brood up there. So I'm going to build this colony back up together again, get the first bits out of the way, and then we're going to look into those frames of brood that were on the top of the colony. So this is the top brood box that was on the top of the colony, and as you can see, there's a few bees in it but not actually that many bees. So I think predominant amount of brood was in the lower box. You can see though there's plenty of bees down there, but there's not that many. Now what I said before is it is so important to go through every single one of these frames in the brood boxes that you lifted up, both boxes if you're doing it on a double brood, shake off all the bees and kill the queen cells. I'm not going to get fed up of saying it again and again because I know people will forget to do this and you will lose swarms and you'll think, oh, I followed your preemptive demo and it made my bees swarm. It's because you missed the queen cells. This is where people fall foul of this, and I fall foul of it all the time. Easy to miss, so you just need to be very particular, very meticulous, go through, knock them all down. So I just pulled this frame out first because this is a really good sign. This frame here, this was on the edge of the top brood box, and there obviously wasn't any brood in it, and the bees have filled it with honey. So it's not capped, but it's heavy, so it's been fanned down to a decent moisture content already. The bees are doing what they want to do naturally, is storing honey as high up as possible. As we move through this brood nest, you'll see there's going to be brood, emerging brood, there's going to be queen cells. But this is what we're aiming for. We're aiming for all of that brood to emerge, loads of bees in the colony, and then they know where these boxes are and they're going to lift all the nectar up to them. That's the plan anyway. So this is what you're expecting to see up there. You're going to see your emerging brood in the middle, and then they're going to start backfilling that with nectar all the way around. Any available space, they're going to fill it up with nectar. And there are so many frames already in this box that are full of nectar. You can see that's not just a dram or two of nectar. They are going for it this week because it's a big strong colony, really, really nice flows. They're going to fill all of these boxes with honey. Still though, when you're going through these ones, just shake them off, double-check them, get all the swarm cells. And here we go, this is what I'm talking about. A charged queen cell. Now that is an emergency cell. They've only made one, but they've made that as a result of me moving that brood nest away from where the queen is. So the worker bees feel this cell is queenless, we need to make sure that the colony doesn't die out, we're going to produce a new queen. You need to get in there and you need to take that cell down. So now that you've seen one cell, I'm not going to bore you going through each of the cells. There are going to be so many in here. I'm going to go through frame by frame, shake them all off, kill all of the queen cells on both boxes, and then I'll put everything back together again. Now I know this seems like a complicated technique, but it really, really isn't. I'll summarize again what we've done in this portion of the video. We check downstairs in the original brood nest. There is a queen there. There's one frame of emerging brood. There's 6 frames of eggs, there's loads of bees, there's no swarm cells. I've then got a queen excluder and 2 supers that they're packing full of honey. Good job, bees. I've then got my 2 brood boxes up top here that I've had to go through and knock down all of the emergency queen cells because they're so far away from the queen's pheromone down there that the bees think that they are effectively queenless up here. There's lots of honey in these 2 boxes as well. And that is the endgame here. The endgame here in 3 or 4 weeks, cover it all in this video, is to have a brood nest at the bottom, single box, 14 by 12 brood nest. So big frames full of bees, full of brood and a queen, no swarm cells. And then all of that full of honey. You've got to dream big and hopefully the weather plays ball. We've not even got to the June gap in the UK yet, which means that we've got 6 to 8 weeks of summer flows left. So we're only looking at pretty much doubling What's in those boxes already. I think that's achievable. But like I say, stay tuned to the end of the video 'cause you don't want to miss how much honey this colony produces when you do a preemptive demerite. Right, so it's about 9 or 10 days later now, and as you can see, I can't believe quite how much the foliage has grown up around here. So the nettles are nearly as tall as me. Maybe need to get in here and have a little bit of a tidy up and a strim. Goes to show though, the videos are genuine. Like, you can look at the surroundings and see how much everything's grown up. So 9 or 10 days later, I have lost count. What we're going to do is we're going to follow on and I'm going to show you box by box how this colony is doing. Remember what we did before? We went down, we took down all of the emergency cells from these top 2 brood boxes. So in here we're expecting to see backfilling of honey, potentially still some capped brood, no further queen cells. These 2 boxes here, honey supers. Hopefully we're going to see lots and lots of honey in these 2 boxes. And what you're looking to see downstairs in the brood box is that brood nest expanding. Ideally, you're going to see some capped brood, brood in all stages, queen, no swarm cells, and ideally a little bit of space for the queen to lay as well. And what you've done is you've bought yourself a little bit of time. So let's get in. I'll go through the boxes one by one, show you what the colony is looking like after 9 or 10 days. So this is what the top box is looking like. Good amount of bees still up there, but this is the furthest away from the brood nest now. We're going to see some capped brood on these frames, and hopefully we're going to see some backfilling of honey. So I'll pull a few frames out and show you exactly what we're getting in these central frames. So this frame here is indicative of what you're likely to see in these frames. So you've still got a little bit of capped brood, just a ring. Obviously it can't be backfilled, there's no queen or anything up there. No swarm cells whatsoever. Outer edges of the frame backfilling it really, really nicely with stores. And then they're going in and they're putting nectar back in that center. That is pretty much textbook for what you want to see in the top box of a Devereux. And then the frame next to that one— so that was the central frame, this is the frame next to it— and this is perfect. This is what we want to see, frames full of stores. You've got the bees up there to do the business, to bring that honey through, and then they're going to store it. And what you want is nice Big heavy top boxes. So the bees, they're doing exactly what they're supposed to do, they're storing honey as high as they possibly can. Right, next box then. This is my 14 by 12 brood box. This is where the majority of the original brood was. This is the second box down from the top, and as you can see, lots more bees. There's going to be a lot of brood in here as well, but this is really, really good. When you see this on a Demerara and you see them filling all the boxes, you really do get the bumper crops of honey. So I'll pull a couple of frames out from here as well, show you how well the bees are doing in this box. So again, a real mixture of activities happening here. You've got bees emerging, you've just seen the first second of that bee emerging there, so he is about 3 seconds old, that bee. You've got capped brood still there. Round the edges you've still got some nice nectar coming in, fresh nectar, and then on the frame next door they've turned that pretty much into a honey super already. And they're starting to turn it into wax. Lots of nectar, and they're drawing out the bottom of that 14 by 12 frame as well. So this is, it's really good. This is exactly what you want to see, and this is the purpose of a demarater, is to give you that boost of emerging bees. Another bee emerging there now. And then you use those frames to backfill the stores. So I'm really, really happy with this split so far. Vertical split, this is exactly what they're supposed to look like. I've gone through the top 2 boxes just to have a look, but there's no swarm cells. But you don't need to check for the second time because they've not got any resources to make those swarm cells. So top 2 boxes, really, really good. Had a few questions about the queen excluder going in here. You don't need a queen excluder going in here unless you want to do some form of requeening. So if you let one of those swarm cells emerge as a queen and then put a top entrance in, you You can requeen from the top as well. I always put one in as a matter of course though, just as a little bit of protection from any virgins going downstairs and then the queens having a fight. But you can get some drone brood getting stuck in the queen excluder. So if you have no intention of requeening from that top box, running the 2 queens concurrently for a short amount of time, you can actually do this manipulation without this queen excluder here. So then next box down, this is one of the original supers and it is just a National Deep. But this is what I'm using as a super, and as you go further and further down in the demerare, you do tend to find more and more bees down there. I've had a go on this box already. This is a really, really heavy box, so very, very good. The bees are doing exactly what I want them to do, and they've stored a lot of honey in here already. So I'll pull out a couple of frames, and I'll show you some of the best frames from this box here. So there we go, a couple of nice frames, probably about 50% capped on that one there, and then the next one down probably 30 or 40% capped. Lots of nice stores going in, really big, strong, vibrant colonies. So you tend to find when you're doing these preemptive demerays that you get the honey scattered around in different locations. You don't have like a box full of honey and then the next box up is a little bit less full and the next box up— it's all kind of over the place, which is fine. The bees will just backfill it as and when they need. And like I said, the idea is to get all of those top boxes full to the brim with honey. So just lifting up that second super down, that is a really, really heavy box. You've probably got 30, 35 pounds of honey in that box. And then the same in the super below that. So the second super is all drawn out now. They're backfilling it all with loads of nectar, loads of stores, lots and lots of honey going into this colony. So then This is what we're seeing downstairs in the brood nest, and I don't know about you, but I think that's a really, really nice frame of brood, completely full, left to right, top to bottom. The bees are making use of all of that additional space that we've given them. So there's my queen, Blue Queen 2020. She's had enough of being filmed, so she's just going to pop back under there, but you can see Next frame along, she is laying that up as best as she possibly can. They're drawing it out for her to lay in. This is the exact purpose of a Demaray. And here we go, next frame again. So as you can see, we have turbocharged that queen. Look at these frames of brood. And what you will notice down here as well, and this is really why I like a Demaray, is they don't put too much stores in the brood area. They've got so much space upstairs to put those stores that I find they don't tend to put too much down in the brood area, which enhances the ability for the queen to lay more brood. So looking at that bottom brood box now, I've gone through all the frames and there's about 5, 5 and a half frames of brood, I would say. Doesn't look like there's too many bees there at the moment, but that was full to the brim with bees when I opened it up. 5.5 frames of 14 by 12 brood. Wow, this colony is going to boom in a few weeks. Once she's laid up that box, you're going to get all of the bees in the top box emerging, and then closely followed by all of the bees in the bottom box emerging, and they are going to be a force to be reckoned with, hopefully right in the middle of the flow. Right, so there you go. You do get this with Demerays. They're big, strong colonies. You do it on big, strong And then when you're taking them apart and looking at them, the bees are everywhere. Like, they're fine, not aggressive at all, really calm, nice gentle bees, but they're a bit bamboozled, especially because in the top boxes you've got nurse bees that have never really come out of the hive. So you're seeing a bit of orientation flights going on as well into all of the mayhem. So I'm going to stack everything back up, I'll talk to you a little bit more. Right, so there you go, everything's stacked up. Obviously stack the boxes up in the same order or make sure that you've still got the queen excluder in the same place if you want to do any requeening on the top boxes. But I think we're going to call it a day there with this video because all I'm going to show you if I was to come back in 2 or 3 weeks is more of the same really, which is all of the brood is going to have gone from up there. All of these 4 boxes are going to be full of honey, and then that bottom box down there is just going to be full of brood. So the final thing I will say about the Demaray though, The important things are to make sure you don't miss the emergency cells that form in the top box, but also don't think that once you've done that once for the season, that's it, you can just forget about the hive. When you get them into this position here, that's it, all you're doing is resetting the button and you're back in on weekly inspections. Just down in that brood box down there, you need to go in there every week, do your weekly inspections to check that they're not swarming. I've done it, Demarais, where I've come back at this And there's swarm cells in that box and they've not filled it out. So sometimes the bees are just intent on swarming and it is really frustrating when they do that. The final thing to say is that don't think that once you've done a preemptive demarée once for the season that you can't do it again. You, you can just keep on going with this. So if you come back in a couple of weeks and that box is just completely full, left to right, top to bottom with brood, and there's no space at all, and you don't want to add additional space for the queen, you just do the same thing again. Just take that bottom box, lift it up to the top, make sure you've got your stepladder, take the original queen, put her back downstairs, single frame of brood, and then come back, do the same exact process again. And then every time you take one of those brood boxes up there, you turn it into a super, it gets backfilled with honey, and then you're giving that queen additional space to lay. So you can do it twice in the season, no problem. I've done it 3 times in the season before on really big strong colonies that I've taken to the heather. You get them out there on the heather. And this really is a good technique for getting super, super strong colonies, maximizing that honey production and trying to reduce the chance of the bees swarming at the same time. So that's it for the video. Appreciate this has probably turned into a really, really long video, but I wanted to do this one for ages. I wanted to show you all of the steps in the Demaray to make sure that you get it right and show you just how to get these big, strong, super colonies that you time to get that maximum amount of bees. When the flows are on. So like I said, do the maths, work out those 2 or 3 weeks in the season when you think you've got the best chance of gathering a super crop, and can be any time, it can be for the heather, it can be whenever, and then you need to work back and you need to make sure that all of the bees in the top box have emerged a couple of weeks in advance, and then all of the bees in the bottom box have emerged preferably a week, a week or two in advance of that flow. So if you're targeting a flow kind of middle of July, end of July, you need to do this manipulation a good 5 or 6 weeks in advance, and then that way you're going to get all of the bees emerging, followed by all of the bees emerging, and you've just got these colonies that are so, so strong. And hopefully if you do it late enough in the year so you're targeting a late flow, shouldn't have too much of a risk of the bees swarming, although when you get big colonies like this they can just go at any So I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope it wasn't too long. I hope you really like the, the time-lapse approach and getting to see all of the different stages of this manipulation. I hope you can see that it's genuine as well. Like, look how much the plants have grown up in that time. They were literally down by my ankles when I started this video. We've had excellent weather here in North Wales, going to get a bumper crop from this colony, and it's all because I've done a preemptive demerare, maximised my honey crop, and reduced the chance of the bees swarming. So definitely have a go. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.