I feel like I have graduated from beginner to intermediate beekeeper, after spending nearly three hours completely disassembling, reshuffling, and reassembling four booming hives to implement the Demaree method. I found all four unmarked queens without having to examine any frame twice. All without gloves. Four stings.
The Demaree swarm-prevention method was originally published in the American Bee Journal by George Demaree in 1884. The idea is to separate the queen from most of the brood, giving her room to lay, splitting the cluster in two, and convincing the lower cluster (with the queen) that they have swarmed already.
The instructions go something like this:
1. Start with a strong hive in a single deep, with at least eight frames of brood.
(Diagrams are same as always: yellow = capped honey, green = uncapped nectar, gray = brood, white = empty. Q = the queen. Solid black line = queen excluder.)
2. Find an empty deep and an empty super with drawn comb. Remove two frames from the center of the deep
3. Find the queen and insert her along with two frames of mostly-capped brood in center of the empty deep.
4. Consolidate the brood nest in the original deep and place the two extra empty frames on the outside.
5. Reassemble the hive with the most-empty deep with the queen on the bottom, followed by a queen excluder, 1 or 2 empty supers, and the original brood box on top.
Hive after Demaree method
The problem is that none of my hives looked anything like a single deep full of brood. Instead they looked like this:
Double deeps with 12 frames of brood and a few frames of residual winter stores, filling the super above the broodnest with eggs, young larvae, pollen, and nectar. The two strongest hives had built at least 25 queen cups at the bottom edges of frames in anticipation of swarming, but they hadn’t yet laid any eggs in these cups.
Following the principles of the Demaree method, if not strictly the method itself, I reshuffled these hives to look like this:
Based on everything I have read about the swarm impulse, I think this will work. It opens the broodnest, giving the queen space to lay. The nurse bees mostly move up to the brood-filled upper deep, reducing crowding around the queen. The queen ends up surrounded by older bees and not much brood, possibly making her think she has already swarmed. It leaves empty space between the two brood clusters, encouraging the bees to bring in nectar to fill it. It is, as noted by most descriptions, extremely time- and labor-intensive. I’m not sure I would use it for 50 hives, certainly not for 500 or 5000. But for five hives managed for maximum honey production, I think I may have found my swarm-prevention method of choice. Of course I won’t know that for sure until a couple of months from now.
What next?
The bees up top end up isolated from the queen pheromone, and often will produce queen cells. These can’t be allowed to emerge, or the pheromone from the new queens may inspire the old queen to swarm. They should be well-fed queens, raised by strong hives, ideal for making nucs. So late next week (hopefully not too late as I will be away Saturday-Thursday) I will open the top boxes, moving some queen cells into nucs if the weather ahead looks decent for queen mating and destroying the rest.
Two weeks from Demaree, the brood up top will have mostly emerged, and the queen will have filled the bottom box with brood. Brood production is limited if the queen can only lay in one box, and crowding around the queen can reignite the swarm impulse. So I will reshuffle the frames, again moving most of the brood up and leaving the queen with the empty frames moved down from the top box.
The plan will go something like this:
April 2: Initial Demaree shuffle
April 10-11: Destroy queen cells, make nucs if weather looks good.
~April 16: Second Demaree shuffle
~April 23: Destroy queen cells, maybe make nucs?
~April 30: Third Demaree shuffle.
~May 7: Destroy queen cells and make nucs, or use my double screen board to split the strongest hive
~May 14: Depending on weather, strength, and swarm reports, either do a fourth Demaree shuffle or else return the hive to normal configuration.
Of course this is beekeeping so plans will change in response to bee behavior and weather. I’ll report as the season progresses. For now the bees look great, and with the bigleaf maples just entering full bloom and 70-degree weather predicted next week it is shaping up to be a good month.
I need some nuc boxes, and I found plans to make four nucs from a 4′ x 8′ sheet of plywood. http://www.squidoo.com/6-easy-steps-to-make-a-nuc-box
I think I know what my next bee project will be…