How to build up a colony and stop swarming with the Demaree method

hi i'm peter cowan the bee whisperer today we're going to do a few different things have you ever heard of the demeri method well the demeri method is a way of growing up your hive to get a much bigger population without having it swarm it's a way of depopulating the brood chamber to make sure that the uh queen area or the brood nest area is not overcrowded with bees in particular because a colony can be overcrowded because of too much honey in the brood chamber or too many bees in the brood chamber and what i'm hoping to find today is a few hives to demonstrate the demeri method or one of the demeri methods of depopulating the brood chamber so let's see what we find okay so what we have here is a colony which is growing quite well we've got two full brewed chambers of bees a queen excluder and a honey super on right now the bees have been growing but we're getting to the point where i'm finding a lot of hives are wanting to swarm and this is a way of building up a strong hive and minimizing the chance of swarming but it's not without work there's a lot of work involved in the demary method in terms of watching for queen cells and that sort of thing but what we're doing is we're doing a manipulation which will allow our colony to build up very significantly and give us a very big population of bees which is what you really want to get a good um harvest of honey from a hive so we're going to set up one or two hives like that with what we call a demerit method so first of all what we'll do is we'll tear this down and then we'll get get ready uh to do it it's uh as i say it's a labor intensive but it can be very effective method of building up your colonies so first of all i'm just going to tear it down to the base i've got a honey super here i'm not even going to look in the honey super right now i can tell everything i want to know from a honey soup but by its weight and this is half full maybe 15 pounds of honey in here there'll be plenty of bees in it it's full of bees which is good it's keeping a few of the bees out of the way right now and then we have the brood chamber and what i need to do while we have the brood chamber here is find the queen so the debary method is a little bit problematic if you can't find the queen so this is not necessarily for your beginner class and we're gonna have a look in here and try and find the queen so you can come closer uh you can tell that there's a honey flow on this yard is not going to benefit from the honey flow as well as it other yards could do because right now i've got about 80 hives here so this yard is way overcrowded with bees right now the main honey flow should come in a couple of weeks time and my aim is to allow this colony to keep on growing without threat of swarming and what i have to do there is to split things up but one way you can tell that there's a honey flow on is look how white this comb is all brand new bright white foam being built here and as soon as they built it they're filling it with honey so that's all full of honey uh we're not as likely to find the queen on that frame on that side but we've got brood on this side in fact that we've got a lot of drone brood on this side but we're gonna look for the queen as we go along and once we find the queen then things will go quite quickly again this is full of honey a little bit of drone brood which i don't want there so i can trim that off okay double checking for the queen if anyone sees the queen shout out look at that for a laying pattern absolutely full of brood so the queen is less likely to be on the frame like this because there's absolutely nowhere for her to lay this colony is already pretty full of bees each of these supers is full of bees it's ready for another super now um and we're looking we've got a lot of emerged brood here and this is just a place where the queen would be laying eggs again in fact she's relayed a lot of eggs in here this week maybe about three to four four dale blobby so she's already filled this space up with larvae and eggs again a lot of emerged brood which queen is already back filled with larvae before her daughters could backfill it with honey so all of this population is going to be bees in a few weeks time so we're going to take advantage of that so i've got all of this these frames full of brood and what we ideally want the queen to be on is a frame just like that one was lots of emerging brood on it perfectly a frame like this in fact a frame is full of chat brood which is just starting to emerge this is the key frame that we'd like to use something like this with a queen on it and of course the queen's not on it we can always put her on it once we find her right now we're still looking a big colony like this it's always a challenge to find the queen this is something that you can do to earlier in the brood seat and in the season in fact uh look here we've got trouble developing queen cells let's see if there's charged queen cells at that so this colony is in the process possibly that in that location it could be supersedia um but i see another one over here with an egg in it so it's very important with this hive that we go through it thoroughly and find those queen cells because one thing about this is we're going to if we miss a queen cell we will end up with a swarm um so although this is a method to try and prevent swarming what this really is the method to do is try and build up the population [Music] and whenever you build up the population you're increasing the possibility of swarming we haven't so hopefully just temporary uh uh um uh the damari method is a method that's commonly used in europe but it's very much under utilized here and you actually don't actually often see people talking about it on youtube either open here look at all that royal jelly because there are multiple queen cells i know we're probably talking swarming not supersede you [Music] that's why they're coming out happy young queen in this hive alright [Music] if you can look through some of these boxes on the side here what i'm looking for is a few frames that are built that have comb already on them but they're not necessarily full of honey so you can see if you can find three or four amongst those [Music] yep that's good that sort of rain [Music] so the queen cells in this hive were kind of hidden because they didn't see them underneath the supers more queen cells here we got this just in time i think they're not capped queen cells or open queen cells so if you're cutting out queen cells as a method to prevent swarming this is something you've got to do anyway setting up the hive with the debary method might be a way to keep things going look at this another queen cell just in time left now of course if you cannot find the queen there's a way of being sure of getting the queen down there and that's just to shake every v down into the bottom of the box which is what we're effectively we're going to be putting the queen down in the bottom box and so as we have to shake these frames anyway that may be exactly what we end up doing well that's always nice to demonstrate moving the queen first but as we have a lot to do we're not going to spend a lot of time a lot more time hunting like one of these beasts but almost twice as long with a much longer abdomen okay so we weren't lucky here so we didn't find between so what we're going to do is we're going to set it up for the dimension method peter okay maybe four [Music] just good space for the queen to build on and lay on and then we're gonna fill the rest of the area up with foundation so we can get a few more frames of foundation from our work in this foundation so we're going to load up some friendly foundations and that'll do just for now just one more of these we'll put this one back so it's not in the sun thank you so now what we have to do is we are going to put all the bees down here so it's going to we're going to pick up a proverbial storm here right now so much see if we can see the queen if we can't see the queen we're having a quick look for all the bees i don't see her there oh queens cells [Music] um this was that frame i thought would be perfect so i'm gonna shake it off make sure there's no uh green cells on it this is gonna go in here checking that there's no queen cells nice frame of the merging brood going right into the middle of this blue chamber but all the rest is empty empty foundation there's some space [Music] okay he's better at that okay sure then i've got an extra pair of experienced eyes looking for a queen which is good that makes much more sense okay [Music] still don't see the queen here she's more likely what i tend to find is when i can't find her the first time i often find that she's a blacker cleaner every time we've had a hard time it ends up being black really dark can't steer hmm i still don't see the queen oh there she is nicely done nicely done she is a queen okay so now we know the queen is here we're gonna make sure she goes in here okay now she is definitely in the bottom box that is the critical thing now all we have to do is check the swarm cells with our bees here and we can finish this box right now now we know the queen is in here we can finish this box the foundation one two three four five six seven eight nine ten we've got one frame of brood mostly capped through which is emerging all the rest is open space and the queen can lay on the open space or they're starting to build the comb here so now that we've got this what we do is we make sure she's trapped in there with a queen excluded so take a queen excluder i know the queen's pretty much in the middle we know the big queen's not trapped up there she went down in the middle so now the queen is confined to this space now what we're going to do is put our first honey super back on so that was the honey super we have here take that queen excluder off we're going to use that in a minute this honey super is filling up nicely with honey it's actually going to be comb honey now what we're going to do is we are going to put another honey super on to increase the depth and give them plenty of room so here's a super totally empty to space those honey frames out okay so queen is down here queen excluder honey super honey super now what i've seen in some instances with a demeri method is another queen excluder went up here now exactly why that is i don't know because in theory there's no but no more queens um but as it's not going to cause any problem i'm going to put that queen i will use a queen excluded up here it's uh not going to cause any problem i will study more as to why there's another queen excluder up here it's probably just in case the bees develop another queen up here so what we are going to do is we are now going to put the brood chamber up at the top so all the rest of this brood is going back up here and we know that there's no queen up here what we want to make sure is that every one of these frames full of brood have no queen cell on them so i'm going to go through them just quickly shake the bees off check for a queen cell in most cases so the queen cells are a little bit of honey a little bit of brood take care of anything which looks like it could possibly be a queen cell that's coming off that's going back on here honey there honey there put these which we've already checked back on these honey supers i mean these this form of brood chamber is now going to become the uh a honey super in fact they're gonna have two deep honey supers up here as well as things what we are going to ensure [Music] so that's one brood chamber that's going to become a honey super and then we're going to put the other brood chamber on to see if that becomes a hundred super as well let's shake a few bees off it i got some foundation here wasn't it yeah just to uh i want to make sure that all this brood foam i'm shaking up here has no clean cells on it at all so plenty of brood plenty few resources i want to make sure that the queen cells have been removed and i'll have to come back into this hive in a week's time to be sure it's still that way because what they're going to do because there's a big gap between where the queen is and where the rest of the brood is they're going to make queen cells and they may make 40 or 50 of them as emergency superseder cells because the pheromone from the queen is far enough away from these bees to make them act like they're queenless so after a week i'm going to go through here remove all the queen cells from this super and the super above at the two deeps to be sure that there's no queen cells and that will postpone swarming until they consider making queen cells down here but they may not do that so these are going to be heavy honey supers okay so i'm going to check check these frames for queen cells smashed first time these all just get filled with honey by which time all of this food will have been emerged and uh we'll be old enough to join the field course so that will give us so that is [Music] right so what we have down here the queen has been reduced to a single frame of brood all of the rest is empty space which she will be filling with over the next two weeks or so the original first honey super is now directly above the brood chamber separated by a queen excluder we've added another honey super here and the original brood chamber double deep is up here and all of that brood will emerge over the next three weeks and become part of the field force in the meantime the young nurse bees up here as it starts to run out of young bees up here they will make their way down to where all the young bees are down here all the brood is here so we'll have nurse bees to look after these these guys down here but for now this brood chamber has now been decluttered the roof the queen has nine more frames he can build on as well as that a tenth when that emerges the next few days we've depopulated the brood chamber because all the house bees are up here looking after the out looking after the brood and we're gonna have a much bigger field force because by the time this field these bees are ready we have a relatively compact brood chamber down here that's called the demeri method or the mary split there's a few different versions of it but this is the here's one i'm trying to demonstrate i'm peter callum the bee whisperer see you next time

Channel: Beekeeping with The Bee Whisperer

Views: 92,351

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Id: Ax5eHE3mdj8

Length: 30min 53sec (1853 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 15 2022