The books / Swarming and Increase / chapter 10 of 15
The Demaree method
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- Reproduction, not disaster
- The four triggers
- Swarm cells and supersedure cells
- Egg to capped in eight or nine days
- Why seven days
- Reading the signs
- Give them room first
- Cutting cells is not a plan
- Pagden's artificial swarm
- The Demaree method
- The nucleus split
- The bait hive
- After the swarm
- Growing an apiary for nothing
- Laying room is not storage
The Demaree method solves the same problem as Pagden's split without splitting the workforce across two locations, which matters if honey production is your priority.
The queen stays where she has always been, in the bottom box, given empty drawn comb to keep laying. Above her goes a queen excluder, and above that goes the existing brood, now separated from her by a barrier no queen can cross.
Any queen cells that appear in that upper box are destroyed as the brood emerges over roughly the next three and a half weeks, since the colony still has every incentive to raise a replacement once it senses the queen's absence from its immediate area.
The full adult population stays together on one stand throughout, foraging as a single strong colony, which is the entire point:
You get swarm control without paying for it in honey.