In this episode of his beekeeping vlog, Laurence Edwards walks viewers through the final Demeray split on a large colony as the season winds down. He begins by reviewing the split setup from the previous episode – three brood boxes lifted onto a 14 × 12 brood box with the queen on a single frame – and then conducts a detailed inspection of the top three brood boxes, locating and destroying any emergency (swarm) cells. Edwards explains why thorough removal of these cells is critical to prevent swarming, showing close‑up footage of uncapped and capped queen cells. He then evaluates the hive’s stores, decides to sacrifice a frame of brood and some frames of stores for future splits, and outlines the final hive stack (three deep, three shallow, and one 14 × 12 box) that will be filled with honey. Moving to the lower brood box, he finds the queen easily, cages her briefly, counts five frames of eggs, and confirms the absence of swarm cells. Throughout, he comments on the strong nectar flow, the bees’ temperature‑regulating fan behavior, the approaching storm, and the fact that the apiary will be abandoned at year‑end. Edwards reflects on the pros and cons of repeated Demeray splits for queen longevity, expresses confidence that the colony will fill the remaining boxes with honey, and promises to continue weekly inspections until the season’s close. The video ends with a call to subscribe for future updates.
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Right, we're back here on maybe episode 11. I lose count on the episodes of these bee series. We're back here today though to look at the final Demeray split on the colony behind me that we're trying to do everything we possibly can to avoid them swarming. Last episode, we took all of those 3 brood boxes, we lifted them up to the top, we replaced it with a 14 by 12 brood box, put the queen down there on a single frame of brood, and I'm back here 8 days later to go through those top 3 brood boxes just to knock down any emergency cells, and then I'll do Standard inspection downstairs in the bottom box to make sure that they're not swarming. Once we get through this inspection here today, we are straight up into weekly inspections only. No more jiggery-pokery, no more moving boxes around, no more going up in stepladders. We're going to reduce this stack down hopefully next week once that top 14x12 brood box is released of all of its brood. Hopefully they don't backfill it with honey again this time. The flows are back on. If we can keep this colony here, we're going to end up with a huge, huge amount of honey. I'm very excited. Also, it's a little bit of a farewell to this apiary because we are leaving this apiary at the end of the year. Really sad. And this colony just goes to prove how good this apiary actually is. So I'll get my bee suit on. Let's go and take a look how the bees are getting on. Right, I already know the bees are going to be angry because it has been such a hot day here today, 25, 26 degrees, and there is a massive storm coming in. So I'm hoping I'm going to get this video finished before the storm gets here. You can hear the bees going like a proper air conditioning unit, which means that the flow is back. Really good to see that the flow is back, but also they're going to be so, so angry that I'm opening them up. It's about 8 o'clock in the evening at the moment. Just thought I'd warn you on that one. Let's get to the top though. We'll go through all those 3 brood boxes first, see if they've made any emergency cells, and then we'll take it from there. So this is a classic example of the kind of emergency cells that the bees will make up in the top end of a Demerara split. If you look at that frame there, nothing on it, but you've just got one single emergency cell that is yet to be capped. Same as this frame over here, all of the brood is emerging. Got no eggs, no larva apart from a couple of open larva over there, and then we've got a single emergency cell over in that corner. Do need to be really careful when you're doing these splits. Make sure you go through every single frame knocking down every emergency cell that you can find. Don't give them a chance to cap them over. Because you really can lose swarms quite easily, and that is not what we want, especially with this series. So you can see on there we've still got a little bit of open brood. Got my days slightly mixed up. I think I'm 6 days into it now since I made that Demarais split, but this should be fine. Bees will be very, very unlikely to turn any of the open brood there into another emergency cell. Kind of past it now, and I'm pretty confident that if I knock these down, the bees will be fine. Just thought I'd open that one up though, just before I knock it down, give you a bit of a close-up, show you that is a genuine viable emergency cell. Absolutely flooded with royal jelly, good young larva that they've selected there to turn that into an emergency queen. If you were to leave that, that would be an emergency queen, and that queen could easily take this colony away and swarm. Knock them all down, make sure you don't miss any, and then you can move on. So you can see already that the bees are backfilling these frames with nectar. I pulled this frame out here first and I thought, oh, here we go again, they're just going to fill everything up. But this actually is the only frame that I've got any nectar in. I've got a frame that's just completely capped stores, that's a legacy one from the original brood nest. But this is more what we're seeing— completely empty frames, little bit of pollen in them. I'm going to take my chances now and I'm just going to take this box off. Okay, I'm going to sacrifice a frame of brood, I'm going to sacrifice a couple of frames of stores, but we can reuse this, we can make some splits up with it. Not going to leave it any longer, and I'm not going to risk it being backfilled any further with any stores. So as with everything with beekeeping, timing is very important. I'm going to cut my losses here. About a frame and a half of brood that I'm going to donate to another colony, and then I've got a couple of frames of stores that I will just use to make up some splits. Everything else is empty frames, and then everything else left in this stack can be used as honey supers. I'm going to take that box out now. That one's not going back. This is going to be the final size of the stack, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 boxes. 3 national deeps, 3 national shallows, and a 14 by 12 brood box. We fill all of that up with honey, I'll be very, very happy indeed. Let's take a look at the other top 2 brood boxes though, double-check there's no swarm cells up there, and then we'll go down to the new brood area. So been through all the frames there, went through it twice just to double-check, found 2 emergency cells. Lots of nurse bees, lots of empty frames as well, which is really good, and then a little bit of emerging brood still. That's why a demerare works so well, is that you get all of the emerging bees, the emerging nurse bees coming out of the brood at the top, but the queen downstairs and the colony doesn't know that. They treat it as 2 separate distinct areas. So the queen downstairs is thinking, we've not got any brood, we need to lay as many eggs as possible. And then you kind of keep on tricking them into boosting the colony numbers. And that is how you end up with stacks this big that are full of bees. If you just leave bees to manage their brood nest accordingly, then the queen is always aware, the colony is always aware of how much brood is there, and then they will slow down the queen or speed up the queen as necessary. If you do a Demarais split though, you're constantly tricking them, you're constantly making that queen work harder. And as I've said before, there is an argument to say that you're potentially knackerin' your queens quite early doing this. I don't think you can consistently do this year after year and think that you're going to get three or four years out of a queen. The maximum I would say is you'll get two years out of a queen doing this, but it means that you keep your queens there, means that you get the very best out of them, and then if you force them to supersede, I think that's a good trait to have anyway. And then you can see what you'll get out at an F. Let's go to the next box, see if they've made any cells up there. So what's really promising to see, and every single box has had a good few frames like this now apart from that top one, lots and lots of open nectar. There is so much coming in, and you could hear that just as I walked up filming today. You could hear the, the hum coming out of the air conditioning units. Easy sign to show that the bees are on the flow, high humidity within the hive, lots of nectar. And they're just fanning it down, trying to get it to that correct humidity level. Really good to see though. I love it when we're back on a flow, and I do think you can tell a little bit that the bees are acting a bit nicer today because they're on that flow. So I know that doesn't look like an emergency cell, but it definitely is an emergency cell, and it's completely capped over, and you can just see how easy it would be for the bees to swarm. So don't think a demerare is a one-stop shop. You do your manipulation and you come back and they've never swarmed. Do need to come back kind of 6 to 8 days later just to knock these cells down. And if you wanted to, you could use that frame there to go and set up another colony. It's an emergency impulse queen, but some people use them, some people get on well with them. Perfectly viable queen inside there. I'm not going to do that though, I'm just going to knock it down. Right, so top 3 boxes, every single one of them had at least one emergency cell. Make sure you go through, knock down your emergency cells, We won't go into the supers today, but I reckon they're going to be a bit heavier than they were before. Let's skip through all those, go into the brood box, find the queen, do our weekly inspection, show you just how many eggs she's laid, because I reckon this week she is going to have gone crazy down there. So I know they're a bit flighty. It's about half 8 in the evening, see the storm coming in, but they are definitely in a better mood. The flow is back. You can see that from all of the frames. They're not stinging my fingers. They're not going for me. Brood box is pretty much full as well. So this is what the brood box is looking like now. All of the bees are back down there. All that can mean is that we're going to have some brood down here. Wouldn't have a big brood box like that completely full if the queen wasn't there, she wasn't laying eggs, she wasn't drawing those bees down there to tend to that brood. Let's get in there, take a look at the queen. She seems to be very, very easy to find, this queen, which is a very good trait. I like a trait when the queen's easy to find. Hopefully they're not doing any swarm preps in this brood box. Right, so there's my queen. Nearly put this frame back down, but you can see same queen. She's definitely not swarmed. I'm going to pop her into a cage because I want to shake off some of these frames here. Just want to put her off to one side. Quite a lot of bees congested in this brood nest now. Just want to double check there's no swarm cells down here, and then I think we're on to a good one with this colony, and I don't think they're going to swarm. Famous last words again. But there is the queen. Right, so as soon as I got into that brood box, they got really angry with me. 5 frames of eggs I counted down there. I found the queen. Also, there was a huge, huge amount of nectar. Every single frame completely sodden. So I stopped shaking it off. I didn't want to shake off all their hard work in the day. Also, no swarm cells at all. I'm going to put everything back together again, let these bees calm down a little bit. And then we'll talk about why I think we've passed the most difficult part of the season. So there you go. Final manipulation of the season. Brood box is getting filled up nicely with brood again. The queen is still there. We're hitting the solstice in about a week and a half. That storm is coming. It is going to pour down with rain any second. But these are very, very content bees. They've got enough space, they've got enough food, they've got the forage around them, and they have gotten out about 6 to 8 weeks of really strong summer flows here, and I have every confidence that they're going to fill every single one of those boxes. We'll come back, we'll do regular inspections. I will keep this series going until the end of the year, not quite as hard as the Making Splits series. I hope you're enjoying this one. I hope your bees are not swarming and they're behaving as best as they possibly can. If you've not been here before, hit the subscribe button to make sure you get regular updates to all of my videos.
