In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards demonstrates a vertical Demaree split designed to prevent swarming in a Flow Hive. He explains why swarming occurs when brood space is limited and why traditional split methods become impractical for hobbyist beekeepers with only a few hives. Edwards outlines the specific equipment needed—a new brood box, foundation frames, and a second queen excluder—and stresses the importance of locating the queen before manipulation. He then walks through the step‑by‑step process: removing the Flow Hive roof, stripping the hive, inserting a queen‑containing frame into a fresh brood box, adding queen excluders, repositioning the original brood box above the Flow super, and sealing the configuration. He advises a follow‑up inspection after eight days to remove any emergency queen cells, and a later decision point (about 2½ weeks) to either remove the top box, perform another split, or overwinter the colony in a double‑brood setup. Edwards emphasizes that this method can buy beekeepers three to four weeks of swarm control, is best used proactively, and is suited for those maintaining only a few hives rather than scaling up to large apiaries.
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In this video, I'm gonna show you the method that I'm gonna use to try and stop my bees swarming in a Flow Hive. Now, I really enjoyed using my Flow Hive this year. The boxes now are completely full, full brood box, and the super is pretty much full. I'm coming back later this week to do the honey harvest video, so if you're interested to see how much honey I get from my Flow Hive super, definitely hit the subscribe button. But what I wanna show you today is the method that I'm gonna use in order to try and stop the bees swarming. I'll do this one again next year, and I'll do it on all of my Flow Hives going forward. And what I'm gonna show you is a vertical split called a demarée, and I don't believe anybody has done this in the UK on a Flow Hive before. So I find it very difficult with the Flow Hive to try and kind of work out in my mind what's the best swarm management technique. At the moment, I'm on an 8-frame Langstroth single brood box, and the bees have completely filled that out. So already I'm introducing a swarming trigger into the bees because they're limited by the amount of space they've got in the brood nest. I've got a super, a Flow Hive super full of honey, and I'm gonna break the seal on that, and I'm going to extract it later on in the week. Now what that's going to do is that's going to drain all of the honey out, and I'm going to have a nice empty super, and I'm going to give the bees in the hive as a whole additional space to store honey. That does pretty much nothing to stop the bees swarming. It's downstairs in the brood nest where you really need to pay attention, because by restricting the space in the brood nest, that is a surefire way to get your bees to go and live in someone's chimney. So what you could do, really easy method, is you could just split this hive into 2 hives. You could do it in the spring, could do it in the Do it when your bees are strong enough to be able to do a split. But I'm not a fan of doing splits to control swarming because it's okay when you're kind of doing it on 1 hive and then 2 hives and then 4 hives and maybe 8 hives. But as soon as you start getting up into the 16s, then 32s and 64s and 128s and 256s and 512s— and you kind of get the idea that I know those numbers off by heart because I've done this video before— it soon becomes, especially with Flow Hives, very, very difficult to keep up with the cost of purchasing that equipment. And the reason that I really do like the Flow Hive, like I have had so much fun with this Flow Hive already this year, but the reason I like it is that I think it suits people who wanna have 1, maybe 2, maybe 3 hives in their garden, and they have no interest in turning those 3 hives into 6 hives and then 12 hives. They just wanna keep some hives in their garden and they just wanna get some honey from a tap. Really, really cool. So this method is for you if you just wanna keep a couple of hives in the garden and you don't just wanna watch the bees swarm every year, because that is quite irresponsible just letting the bees go out swarm, could be flying out there infecting the local area with diseases. This method here should give you the ability to start moving boxes around into different configurations in order to try and mitigate swarming. So there we go, that's the preamble. It's a vertical Demarest split. If you've seen this channel before, you'll know this method. If you're watching this as a first time as a Flow Hive user, I reckon you certainly won't have seen it yet. I've not seen anybody use this method on a Flow Hive. The method is so simple though. All we're doing, we're not doing a horizontal split, taking one Flow Hive and splitting it into 2. We're doing a vertical split, which is taking the brood box, lifting it up to the top, and replacing the brood box underneath with a new brood box full of foundation, and we make sure that the queen's downstairs. In order to do this manipulation, you need 2 things. You need a new brood box exactly the same size as your original Flow Hive brood box. You need a box full of frames of foundation. That's included in the first one, but you also need a second queen excluder. The only reason I say that is you want to kind of restrict the drones up from the top box, and if you're going to get any virgins running around, you don't want the virgins ever to run around in your Flow Hive supers. So I've spoken about that way too much. I'm going to show you exactly how to do it now, and I'm going to set this colony here up for a vertical split. So the first thing you need to do, and this is definitely going to be a theme in my videos, is that you take off the horrible wooden gable I cannot stand this roof. There is just nothing to like about it. Can't get a good-sized feeder underneath it. Can't stack it up on the floor and put boxes on it. It's made of wood, so it's gonna rot. I hate the Flow Hive roof. Then what we're gonna do is we're gonna start moving some boxes around. I'm gonna take them out of shot because what you need to do is you need to strip down everything, take everything away, and then we're gonna build it back up again from scratch. I forgot to mention, this manipulation, you must be able to find your queen. Queen cannot do it if you cannot find the queen. So get your glasses out, get your magnifying glasses out. Make sure you can find her or get someone to come along with you that can help you find that queen. Right. So I said it'd be an easy manipulation. Does not come any easier than this. Take everything off, put it somewhere safe. Get yourself a new brood box and you put your new brood box into the original brood position. This is an eight frame brood box, but I've got a gap in there. Got a gap for. one single frame. What you need to do now is go over to your original brood box that you've stacked off somewhere else and go and find the frame that's got the queen on it. One frame, preferably a frame of capped emerging brood. Take that frame with the queen and we're going to put that downstairs into this new brood area. Right, so there we go, that's the frame with my queen on it. See if you can find the queen. Try and get the frame with the most capped emerging brood. But you know what, it's not the end of the world as long as you've got a little bit of capped brood on there and you've got a frame that isn't just a frame of stores. That will work fine. So you take this frame and you place it downstairs into this new brood box. As far as the bees are concerned, that's their new brood area now. We're going to put a queen excluder on, put the Flow Hive super back on, and then we're going to lift that original brood nest all the way up to the top And block it off with a queen excluder. Right, first thing we're gonna do, we're gonna take our queen excluder, place that onto the new brood box like that. We're then gonna take our flow super, place that back into the middle position directly above the new brood box. Then we're gonna take our second queen excluder, place that on top like that. Then we're gonna get the original brood box, put that on there, and add the last frame of foundation. So that's the manipulation complete. You need to come back in 8 days and go through the top brood box because they will create emergency queen cells. If you just leave it now, the bees will swarm. So this is a guaranteed method to make your bees swarm, but it's a really good method to try and mitigate them swarming. But you need to follow the next step, which is coming back in 8 days' time, going through this box here, taking down every single emergency queen cell that you can find, and then you can leave the bees. And this method here will buy you maybe 3 or 4 weeks throughout the season. I do it as a proactive method. I wouldn't recommend it as a reactive method, but you can do it as a reactive method as well. So if you go and find swarm cells downstairs, you can do this, but don't come back to me if they swarm because it's not a guaranteed method that way at all. What will happen now is that the bees will gravitate downstairs. All of the nurse bees that emerge upstairs here will gravitate downstairs to the and brood that the queen will start laying downstairs. You've given them a box full of foundation, so that's going to really satisfy their need to kind of draw stuff out, and that in itself helps them stop swarming. After about 2 and a half weeks, once all of this brood up here has emerged, what you need to do is you need to make a decision on what you're going to do next. If you don't want to do any splits and you're really worried about them storing honey upstairs, Once all of the brood has emerged, just take this box away. Take it away, wash out the frames, get the honey out of them, and then you can just go ahead and do this manipulation again. Sounds a little bit confusing, but this manipulation here will buy you 3 to 4 weeks. I will follow this up later on in the season to show you exactly what I'm going to do with these bees. For me, I'm going to overwinter in a double brood configuration using this brood box and this brood box. But this method here of a vertical split is all about configuring the boxes in a different way above and below that Flow Super, with the 2 main aims here to get as much honey as we possibly can in the Flow Super and to try and make the bees stop swarming. If you want to see what comes up next in this series, definitely hit the subscribe button. We'll be doing loads more with our Flow Hives this year and next year.
