Demaree Method of Swarm Control

After last years rather unsuccessful attempt at swarm control using the Snelgrove Method this year I decided to try the Demaree Method on Hive1 this year. It seems a fairly simple method of swarm control and lets all the bees in the hive continue to work on the same honey crop.

The basis of swarm control is to make the bees think they've already swarmed. A swarm that's left a colony to start anew consists of a Queen Bee and a cadre of mature forager bees, no young bees and no brood. So if we can remove the brood and young bees they might just fall for it. The Demaree Method was first published in an article by George Demaree in an 1884 edition of The American Bee Journal. Here's the method broken down as I understand it:

Equipment:
Existing bee hive with Queen Excluder, Super(s), lots of bees etc
Brood box with full compliment of frames and foundation.

Method
1. Remove existing hive from hive floor and place the new brood box in it's place.
2. Remove the middle frame from the new brood box.
3. Locate the Queen Bee in the old brood box, place that frame in the middle of the new brood box.
4. Put Queen excluder over new brood box, replace the supers.
5. Place old brood box on top of Super(s)
6. Push the frames in the old brood box together and pop the spare new frame in at one end.
7. Put the crownboard and roof back on.

What should happen is the young bees will continue to tend the brood in the old brood box but with the queen will be unable to get through the excluder to lay any more eggs in it after 21 days there should be no brood in it at all. Meanwhile foraging bees will climb down from the old brood box to go foraging and on their return to the new brood box where the queen is should remain there. As there's new foundation they should start drawing it out and making new comb similar to what they'ed do if they had just moved to a new cavity.

The young bees in the old box at the top of the hive may decide to make some new queens if they think they've lost the old one and some sort of division board can be used to turn them into a separate colony if required or you can just reunite them down later.

Locating the Queen in Hive1 took me absolutely ages. She kept hiding away. I separated the the combs into pairs to limit where she could be but in the end had to search through the frames about 3 times before I located her. I then transferred her frame into the centre of the new brood box and popped the empty new frame into the old box.

You may be able to work out which is the old frame in here.

I then plonked the Queen Excluder back on and the Super which the bees are working on in earnest.

Working in the Super.

I then put the old brood box on top of the super. I actually want to raise some new Queens from this hive so I decided to try a method of tricking the workers into creating queens. The technique is called 'notching' which is pretty much all the beekeeper needs to do. Using a hive tool the beekeeper presses in the bottom cell walls of some cells with very young brood or eggs -that's the 'notch'. The workers hopeful misinterpret these damaged cells as vertically oriented queen cells and start flooding them with royal jelly to make the new Queens. I've not tried it before but fingers crossed. The current Queens of Hive 1 and 2 are a couple of years old now so due to be replaced.

Hive after Demaree Method

Whilst in the Hive I also cut out the sacrificial drone brood to keep varroa levels down. The comb was only about a third covered with capped drone brood but it should still make a serious dent in varroa numbers.

Drone brood, sacrificed for the greater good.

Reuniting the Artificial Swarm

Well my Artificial Swarm (AS) was making progress but then I made a mistake and to put it bluntly it all went a bit tits up. The AS technique I'd used involves a Snelgrove board which has six doors paired above and below the central board on three sides,  you manipulate these to filter flying bees back to the colony below. After the first four of five days there should be two doors open, as time goes on you close and open doors so the hive entrance(s) move around the board but you only ever have two doors open one to the colony below and one to the colony above.

The AS seemed to be going well, a queen cell had hatched in there and I figured things were looking peachy. I couldn't find her but that wasn't a surprise she would be quite small and still had to mate anyway. However last week whilst having a look to check on her elusive majesty's progress I found two doors open into the artificial swarm. I suspect one got opened by accident rather than left open in fact but the result seems to have been that they got robbed out. Mature bees from the parent colony below them, Hive2 and the nucleus seem to have gone in and taken all the stored food. Being made up of young bees the AS probably didn't do much by way of defending itself and with no mature bees to bring in new food there was a risk of starvation. I went through all eleven frames seeing lots of slow moving (presumably tired and hungry) workers and drones aimlessly wandering on empty comb and a few dead bees on the crownboard and Snelgrove board.

I was surprised to see some dead drones who appear to have mated and made it back to the hive what was left of their sexual organs protruding from their abdomens. I'm assuming they mated elsewhere and returned to the hive rather than mated in the hive with the queen who hatched who'd be their sister. Normally a queen bee flies further to mate than drones which should ensure she doesn't mate with her brothers yielding inbred bees. These two dead bees are actually very small for drones being about the same size as workers.

If these were human this image wouldn't be safe for work

I closed up the box and made up some thin sugar syrup which I then poured into a frame of empty comb so the workers could immediately start distributing it amongst themselves then closed up the hive. I couldn't see any sign of the queen, she may have been in there or she may have been killed during the robbing or lost as a result of manipulating th Snelgrove's doors. I later put a small feeder in an empty super above the AS to give them something to eat and decided to unite them back to the parent colony.

There's a few different ways to unite different bee colonies and the aim is to minimise fighting between them. I initially chose the newspaper method which is probably the most common and probably one of the simplest. Basically you slip a sheet of newspaper above the stronger of the two colonies and put the weaker one on top of that. In theory the bees will nibble through the newspaper and by the time they're through will have made enough contact with the bees in the other colony to consider them part of the same colony. Once united you then open the boxes and choose your eleven best frames to remain and remove the rest or go with a double brood colony.

Two colonies meeting over (and under) a newspaper

After 5 days the bees didn't seem to be taking any interest in the newspaper so I decided to speed things along by going to plan B. Plan B was what I think I'll call the Peppermint Technique. It's quicker than newspaper but probably more disruptive for the bees. Rather than waiting for the bees to gradually make contact by nibbling through paper you spray them with a peppermint spray and put the frames and bees from the one hive directly into the other. The spray obscures their scent and gives them something to do as they lick it off. By the time they've finished licking the spray the two colonies are used to each other.

The former David A. Cushman whose encyclopedic beekeeping website remains a handy resource notes he used to use a water spray with a Fox's Glacier Mint dissolved in it for this purpose. I made up some 1:1 syrup and mixed in a few drops of peppermint essential oil, I then decided it was too thick to spray and watered it down a lot.

I went out to the hives with a spare brood box to house the frames I'd be removing and my peppermint spray. I whipped off the artificial swarm it it's box and discovered I'd been a little quick to give up on Plan A. the bees had started chewing through the newspaper. Ah well next time I'll remember: more patience and less work.

Like myself, the bees were unimpressed with my colleague's choice of reading material

Going through the original brood box I removed 6 frames to the spare and the five remaining ones I pulled out and misted on both sides with the peppermint solution. I pulled five frames from the AS -the ones with the most bees on and stored syrup and misted them too before popping them in the original brood box. Bees left on the unused frames were shaken off and misted with peppermint then I put a crownboard on top of the brood box and a contact feeder with some 1:1 syrup in it to give them something to do and replaced the roof.

Combined colony and spare frames.

I now have 11 spare commercial sized frames some drawn and some not. I'll need to pop them into storage safe from wax moth at some point. Although I'm going to need some of them when I move the captured swarm from the nuc to a full sized brood box.

Artificial Swarm is making progress

Just over a week ago I did an artificial swarm on Hive2 using a snelgrove board. Today I had a look in the top brood box to see what was going on.It was a little awkward due to the height and my frame perch didn't quite fit the side of my brood box. You might notice from the pic I've got handles on 4 sides of the box, the specification only calls for a slight recessed grip but it seemed a good idea to me. Afterall these things get heavy.

Going throught the frames I was able to see there were no eggs and no uncapped brood. That was good news as it meant I hadn't accidentally put the queen in there when I made the artificial swarm. If I had done she'd've been continuing to lay eggs in there. I also found a lot of queen cells. Also good news as it meant the young bees in there had spotted the absence of queen and started making a new one, I cut out all but two of the queen cells then removed the frame one of them was on leaving the other in place.

Supercedure Queen Cell

The queen cell I left in the AS should hatch and hopefully mate. Then I opened Hive2 to have a nosey. Those bees are getting a bit feisty, but at last they've started to work the super. I spotted a few supercedure cells in this hive too so I guess the bees aren't too hapy with their current queen's performance, I'm not ecstatic about the temprament of the hive either so after cutting out all the supercedure cells I found I put in the frame with a cel from Hive1. All being well that new queen will hatch, mate adn replace the original queen ..well that or the bees will kil her. Gonna have to wait and see..

Vertical Artificial Swarm

At last the brood boxes are brimming with bees and there's more in the comb waiting to emerge. When worker bees start hatching numbers increase exponentially. This means that a colony that was looking rather weak can quite quickly get congested and when colonies are congested they're more likely to swarm.

Healthy brood

Burr comb between frame tops, think they're short of space.

Before bees swarm they'll start making a new queen and by the time she hatches the old queen will have done one with a load of your favourite workers. If the beekeeper is vigilant enough and has good enough eyesight he or she should be able to spot queen cells being made during regular inspections and take steps to minimise the risk of swarming. Initially the bees make what's called a 'play cup' or 'queen cup' a round structure sticking out of the comb designed hold an egg horizontally as opposed to stuck to the vertical back wall of a normal cell in the comb.

Empty cup

Finding one of these cups isn't always a sign of imminent swarming. The bees make them and don't always use them hence the name 'play' cups. Sometimes the bees will put and egg into one, then later they'll pull it out and put it somewhere else. I don't know why they do that and have my doubts that anyone else does either -although I suspect they do it just to worry beekeepers. If one of these cells has a hatched larvae swimming in royal jelly in it then you know for sure the bees are making a new queen. If it's half way up the comb like the play cup in the image above it's a supersedure cell meaning the bees are raising a new queen to replace the existing one, if it's at the bottom of the comb it's a swarm queen and half your workforce is looking to abscond. I found two cups at the bottom of a frame in hive1 and  2 in the middle of comb on Hive2. Perhaps Hive1 are thinking about swarming and Hive2 are thinking of revolution.

There's different ways to reduce swarming, you can give the bees more space by adding supers or a second brood box, some people use a second queen excluder below the brood box to stop queens leaving or clip the queen's wings to stop her flying. I've already given both colonies supers but they're not using them just yet, probably dont want to squeeze through the queen excluder.

Whilst those measure should reduce likelihood of swarming the most important method is to make the bees think they've already swarmed. There's different ways to create an artificial swarm and they generally involve splitting a colony. I decided to do a vertical artificial swarm because it means you still have the same number of hives whereas other methods mean making up more hives and I don't have any spare roofs or the space for another two complete hives anyway - plus there was a Snelgrove board included with my original hive.

Snelgrove was a jolly clever bekeeper and entemologist from Somerset. In 1934 his book Swarming Its Control And Prevention was published. It's since been republished fifteen times, most recently in 1998. I haven't read it but there's a good article about it and Snelgrove's technique here. Apparently he'd based his technique on a theory of swarming that was incorrect, despite that his technique was and remains effective and is still in use to this day. His method uses a piece of kit named after it's inventor. The Snelgrove board is, unsurprisingly, a board. It has a square hole in the middle covered by a metal mesh on on each side, and has six doors in the edge arranged in three pairs above and below the board. A photo would make it a lot clearer but I didn't think to take one before I stuck it in the hive this afternoon.

The artificial swarm needs a second brood box and enough frames to fill it and the Snelgrove Board. I'd made a couple of brood boxes previously and a few spare deep frames to go in it and bit's of frames. Just had to make up 7 new frames using a mix of old stuff I'd had sitting about and new gubbins I'd ordered in. Recently a neighbour flogged me a Black & Decker workmate WM825, she'd had it sat in the box unopened for about a year. It's bit Hank Hill and but made assembling the frames easier and I managed to avoid pushing any nails into my thumb this time.

Knocking some frames together

The short version of Snelgrove's artificial swarm technique as I understand it is you take all but two frames from the brood box and put them into a new brood box leaving the queen in the old box with some workers and replace the removed frames with undrawn foundation. The other brood box with it's frames of brood, eggs and worker bees goes on top of the brood box and any supers that are in place seperated by the Snelgrove board. The doors are then opened and closed in sequence over the following ten days to filter forager bees back into the box below. When the door is opened any mature foragers flying out of it will return to the hive entrance they're already used to at the bottom of the box so after a little time all the mature foragers should drift into the bottom brood box where the queen is.

Foragers leaving the side entrance of the Snelgrove Board

The queen and older workers find themselves in a suddenly roomy area with no young bees and very little stores which is pretty much how they would be if they'ed just swarmed, whilst the young bees find themselves with brood, eggs and food stores but no queen or mature foragers which again is how they would be if their Queen had just swarmed. The older bees and queen go about the business of rebuilding  and replenshing new comb whilst the younger bees get a wriggle on and start making themselves a new queen. Later on you can either separate the boxes into two different colonies or remove one of the queens and reunite both boxes to make one stronger colony with a younger queen.

Hive1 with Snelgrove Board and second brood box above the super

Well that's the theory anyway. Unfortunately I couldn't find the queen of Hive1 at all today so I pulled out the frames I wanted making sure the queen wasn't on any of them so hopefully she's still in the original box. I hope the bees do what I'm expecting but they don't always.

I also inspected the other hives today. The swarm I caught are doing well I'm thinking I may build them into a third colony instead of trying to keep them in a nucleus, I managed to locate and mark the queen last week, she's layaing plenty of eggs so the nuc may be full in a few weekds time. The bees in Hive2 are a little tetchy at the moment so I'm thinking I might try and requeen them with a little royalty from Hive1 if things go to plan. Of course that's a pretty big 'if'. I've given both hives supers but so far neither one is making any use of them, to try and encourage them in Hive2 I rubbed some unripe hiney from burr comb on the frame tops. Hopefully that should get their attention.