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Swarming is the single biggest challenge most beekeepers face. Lose a swarm and you lose half your colony, and most likely your honey crop with it. But with the right technique, you can stop it before it starts and boost your honey production at the same time.
Watch Laurence walk through the full manipulation on YouTube:
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Every beekeeper loses a swarm at some point. It's practically a rite of passage. But most of the time, it's preventable. And the technique we're covering here doesn't just stop your bees from swarming. Done right, it significantly boosts your honey production too.
VIDEO
Before you can stop something, it helps to understand why it happens.
Bees swarm for two main reasons. The first is reproduction. It's how colonies multiply naturally. The old queen leaves with around half the workers to find a new home, and a new queen is raised in the original hive. The second reason is more practical: colonies swarm when they run out of space.
When a strong colony is packed in tight, with nowhere for the queen to lay and nowhere to store nectar, the bees start making preparations. They begin raising queen cells. Once those cells are nearly capped (or just capped), the old queen leaves. If you're not watching closely, you'll come back to find half your bees have gone.
The good news is that space is something you can control. And that's exactly what the preemptive Demaree is designed to do.
The Demaree is a well-established swarm control method. The preemptive version takes it a step further. Instead of waiting for swarm cells to appear, you act early when you spot a big, strong colony building up fast.
You're essentially doing a vertical split. The queen goes into a new brood box at the bottom with a frame of brood and plenty of space to lay. The original brood boxes go to the top, far enough from the queen that the bees up there think they're queenless. They'll start drawing emergency queen cells, which you come back and knock down a week later.
Two big advantages set this apart from other methods. First, you don't need an extra floor or roof, so it works even if you've only got one hive setup. Second, while the top brood box is stacked full of emerging bees, the bottom brood box is in a race to catch up. The result is the production of LOTS of bees, which naturally boosts honey production.
It sounds complicated when you write it all out, but in practice it's surprisingly straightforward. Here's exactly how to do it.
This technique is for big, strong colonies. There's no point doing it on a small or struggling hive. You're looking for a colony that's bursting at the seams, with bees covering every frame and real energy building up.