Demaree Method
Splitting (kind of), without increase!
There’s an interesting part of bees that we haven’t covered in the swarming section of this wiki, and that’s Trophallaxis. Trophallaxis is the “spit swapping” part of colony communication. It’s partly why aggressively splitting the brood nest can cause supersedures. It’s also why the demaree method works.
The Demaree method is similar to most other types of splits, in that we remove almost all the brood from the main colony. The only difference is that we do this inside the same hive as the rest of the colony. This manipulation is slightly more difficult to understand than others, so we will explain it after the main method below.
If you want to understand why this works, read the Swarm Control page.
You should now be finished. You will need to wait 21 days for all the brood in the top box to emerge and head down into the bottom story hive. The top box can then be removed. It’s always safe to ensure that there’s plenty of unused space between the top box and the used space below it. That is to say, if they start filling supers, add more supers.
IMPORTANT: If you leave a single queen cell, they will cap it and swarm. The inspection on the 3rd day is to ensure that you didn’t miss any swarm cells, as they’ll be blindingly obvious by then. The inspection on 7th day is to render them “hopelessly” queenless (in their eyes).
The way this works is this: the bees are too far apart from oneanother to pass Queen Manibular Pheromone (QMP) around the colony, effectively making the top half of the colony believe they are queenless. Flying bees will move down the hive to the entrance at the bottom floor, and brood/nurses will be upstairs, with not enough QMP travelling between each half to convince the broodful half that they have a queen. It’s essentially a vertical pagden split, with automatic reuniting as nurses emerge and head to where there’s brood - i.e. downstairs.