I first heard of this about 40 years ago as a method of Swarm Control. For some reason that has disappeared in the mists of my memory, I did not find it very successful. However, recently I have heard a number of beekeepers, new and old, quoting Demaree, so thought I had better re-acquaint myself with it, as some of what I have heard did not seem to tally with my faint recollections from the past. I found an excellent article by G.D. Morse in the Encyclopaedia of beekeeping (Roger Morse and Ted Hooper), but there are several others. My (hopefully) easy to follow presentation of this method follows:
- Move the brood box to one side
- Take a second empty brood box and put it in the position of the original brood box
- Find the queen and place her, on her frame, preferably with some eggs and unsealed brood in the second brood box
- Fill the queens’ box with frames containing foundation
- Put a queen excluder on the box containing the queen
- Place one or two supers on the queen excluder
- Place a second queen excluder on the top super
- Place the original brood box complete with the rest of the brood onto the second queen excluder, and add a frame to restore the full number of frames
- Destroy all of the queen cells in the top brood box
- After a week, check again and destroy any queen cells (if this is not done the colony may swarm)
- After another three weeks, the brood will have hatched out, and the box will act as a super
It should be noted that there are many variations on this procedure, some of which seem to me to be not very easy to follow. A disadvantage of the method is that the hive can become very tall, and so the lifting of a heavy brood box through an uncomfortable height is involved, especially if it eventually becomes full of honey.
Some beekeepers use Demaree, with some modifications, to raise queen cells and hence new queens.
I must emphasise that this article is not intended to recommend or discourage the use of this manipulation. I just wanted to share some of my thoughts and knowledge of it.