Stop Making Splits. Build Strong Colonies and Make More Honey

Making splits is easy. You know what's difficult? Not making splits. If you're happy to continually split your bees again and again and again, beekeeping is probably the easiest thing in the world. You never have to deal with swarming, you never have to deal with the buildup of old black dirty combs, you just split the hive, add a new queen in, and when that gets big enough you split it again and add a new queen in. But as we know, the power of 2 kind of gets you to a point where you cannot keep managing those colonies unless you have some way to sell them. And I know a few people make a very good living doing just that, but not everybody has access to that kind of nucleus colony market. And I would say the vast majority of people keep bees for the bees to produce honey. And if you're just splitting your bees again and again and again, it's very, very easy, but obviously you're not going to get anywhere near as much honey. The real skill in beekeeping is taking, say, 10 colonies into the winter, getting 10 colonies through the winter, and finishing the year with 10 colonies of bees. There is a real skill to doing it. It's probably a bit of an art form as well. I've certainly not mastered it yet, and there are instances where I will have to split my bees, but I've worked out a pretty good system to limit the amount of splits that you need to make each year. And in most instances, you can just stay on one colony size and get it all the way through the season without making any splits whatsoever. So of course, my favorite technique comes into place here, the Demarest split. And the Demarais split is still a split, but it's not a horizontal split. Horizontal splits get you out of control. You turn 1 hive into 2 hives into 4 and 8 and 16 and so on and so on. And then when you get to the point that you've got like, I don't know, a couple of hundred hives and you're thinking, well, if I split all of them, that's 400 hives. Where do you get the money to start buying those beehives? And if you're in it for the honey, you don't want to be doing that anyway. So although it's called a Demarais It's a vertical split, and everything stays on a single floor. All you need is an additional brood box in order to do it. One additional brood box per colony per year, and you can fool the bees into thinking that they have swarmed without turning that colony from one colony into 2. Now, the reason that the bees think that they've swarmed is because instead of taking this one colony and splitting it like that, you've taken this one colony and you split it like that. And without a doubt, it is the most effective Effective manipulation that I have found to make your colonies believe that they have swarmed. Now I'll go into the detail of a Demeray split shortly, and I'll show you exactly how the configuration is set up. But the most important advice that I can give you with the Demeray split is it is a preemptive measure. It's not a reactive measure. And what that means is a lot of the artificial swarms that you see, they are reactive. So you'll go through, you're doing your inspections, and you're like, oh, I've got swarm cells, I've got open swarm cells. So I need to make a split. Now, if you try and do a Demaray split, a vertical split, after you've found swarm cells, the bees will just swarm anyway. Believe me, I've tried it. They pretty much always swarm if you do a Demaray split after you've found swarm cells. But when you do it as a preemptive measure, so you know the bees are building up nice and strong, they're in a single brood box full, you've got a couple of supers full of bees, hopefully some honey in there, and you've done your inspection and there's no swarm cells, That is the time to do your Demarée split. And you're tricking your bees into thinking that they have swarmed. But more importantly than that, the queen in the brood box is free to lay as quick as she likes because she has basically got unlimited space. Now, a Demarée split, super simple. Brood box full of bees, 2 supers on as an absolute minimum, queen excluder in the middle. What you need to do is you take the brood box, you lift it up to the top, Above the queen excluder. At that point, I like to put an additional super on. So you go from however many supers you've got, you want to add an additional super in at that point. You find the queen on a frame of brood, preferably nice capped emerging brood, but any frame of brood will do. And you take that queen and you place her downstairs into a brand new brood box that you've placed in the position of the original brood box. You fill out all of the rest of the frames in that bottom brood box with foundation. And then you just place one frame of foundation into the slot upstairs where you took out that queen frame. That is it. That is the manipulation. It takes 5 minutes to do. 8 to 10 days later, go back in. In the top brood box, they may, and I say may, they don't always do it, but they may have created some emergency cells. Now what you need to do is you go through, shake every single frame off, take down all of the emergency cells. But if you do do that, then the bees will not swarm unless they'd started swarm preps before you started. What's really important as well is upstairs in that top brood box, you either need to put a board in there with a hole to allow the drones to escape, or if you've got like the Abello boxes, not this one, they sometimes have like a hole on that face there that you can just take out and let the drones fly. That's probably the neatest solution, I would say, to get the drones to fly. Otherwise, they'll just go back down and they'll get stuck in the queen excluder. So don't get yourself caught up in that situation. Very, very easy to get your queen excluder blocked with lots of drones. So what's going to happen then is that the queen's like, well, This is brilliant, I've just got loads of frames of foundation. All of the nurse bees emerge down from the top and they join the queen downstairs. They draw out the frames and the queen just goes wild laying everything up. That generally takes maybe 3 weeks for that box to be completely drawn out and completely laid up. And I don't think I've ever had a colony swarm during those 3 weeks. Now, a Demerara split isn't a case of just do it once in the season and then everything is good and you don't need to manage your bees anymore. You still need to do your inspections, But then after that 3 weeks is up, the bees are at risk of swarming once again. What you'll find is that that box at the top is now a honey super. And if you've not used Apivar, you can just leave it as it is and harvest the honey directly from it. If it has been treated, just mark it as treated and we can use it later on in the season. So what's the next step? Like, you've done the Demaray split, you've gone 3 weeks, your bees are now filling maybe 4 supers plus a brood box at the top, and they've got a brood box at the bottom that's ram-packed full of bees again. The next answer is do another Demeray split. You could just keep on doing it. So again, you take your brood box at the bottom, you lift it up to the top, you take the queen down on the frame of brood, put another brood box at the bottom, and you just start it over again. And then you get yourself another 3 weeks. Now if you time that well with 3-week gaps in between and you do it twice, you've got between 6 to 8 weeks of the season where you're kind of quite confident that the bees aren't going to swarm. I like to do my first Demeray splits Early May, middle of May, something like that, depending on how strong the colonies are, depending on how well they came out of winter. And then that gets me through to the first or second week of July with 2 demarée splits. Now some people will do a 3rd demarée split there, but depending on where you are, like if you're down south, you've, you've got through the worst of the swarming season then. All you need to do is somehow work out how you're going to extract all of the honey from the supers and the brood boxes upstairs. And And what I like to do at that point, and I find this is a really nice way of finishing off the Demerara, is that you take those brood boxes that may have been treated with Apivar, you bruise all of the frames. So you're getting a hive tool, just running it over the capping so it's nice and bruised, and then you're placing them underneath the brood box. So you've got brood box full of honey, brood box full of honey, brood box full of brood with a queen excluder in the middle. And then you've got another queen excluder, all of your existing supers, and then add on another couple of supers. And what the bees absolutely hate at that time of the year is having honey underneath the brood nest. So all they do, they take the honey from down here and they put it upstairs into the supers that you've kindly put in place for them. And then you just swipe away the brood boxes, put them into storage, and they are good to use again next year. Now I know that sounds a little bit complicated, but I'll link you out to videos where I've showed you that exact manipulation. And hopefully, you know, the drawings on the whiteboard there show you exactly what I'm talking about. In terms of that manipulation. But I've stayed true to what I've been trying to do there. One colony of bees at the beginning of the season, one colony of bees at the end of the season. I've not made any horizontal splits. I don't need any additional floors or roofs. All I need is some additional boxes in order to carry out that manipulation. Now, the Demaray split comes with by far and away the best byproduct of any of these splits. When you make horizontal splits, you sacrifice honey. When you make vertical splits like that, you gain honey, because what you're doing is you're tricking that one colony into thinking that it has split. The queen's downstairs, he's thinking, where's all the bees gone? Like, you've just left me here, I'm on a frame of one frame of bees, right? We've obviously swarmed. Okay, my job now is just to go into overdrive. And it's not the queen that's thinking that, like, it's the colony telling her, you need to go into overdrive, you lay eggs, we'll draw out these frames for you. And we're going to build this colony back up strong. But at the same time that that brood expansion is going on downstairs, all of the brood upstairs is emerging and joining that colony. It results in huge, and I genuinely mean humongous, colonies of bees. And if you time that peak number of bees in with the honey flows, you do end up with some of the biggest honey harvests that you can possibly get. So what's not to like? Saving you loads of money on boxes, loads of additional honey. You know what, there's nothing not to like. I love the Demaray split. The preemptive Demaray split, along with clipping my queen's wings, transformed my beekeeping. You've definitely got to give it a try. Set yourself a challenge. However many colonies you've got going into winter, see how many you get through. See if you can get to the end of the next year without making any splits whatsoever. Now of course, people might want to make splits. You might want to expand. You might want to sell some nucs. There's always reasons for making splits. It's good to have backup nucs to ensure that you can maintain your numbers and you can replace winter losses. But don't just go on that endless cycle of constantly splitting your bees, because if you want a decent honey crop, the vertical split is probably the best method I have found for ensuring that you get the maximum amount of honey per space on your beehive stand.