🐝 The Demaree Method

About this simulation

George Demaree described this vertical swarm-control split in 1892. Instead of dividing a colony into two hives, it rearranges the same colony within one stack of boxes: the queen is confined low down on empty comb, while all the existing brood is lifted above a queen excluder. Both halves keep the workforce together, but the crowding and pheromone signals that trigger swarming are broken up.

The five steps modelled

• Stage 0 — Original hive. Queen and brood share one crowded box, with honey supers stacked above. Congestion and swarm impulse are both climbing.
• Stage 1 — Remove the supers. Honey supers are lifted off and set aside so the brood box can be opened and inspected.
• Stage 2 — Add a new box of drawn comb. An empty box goes on the original bottom board; the existing brood box is temporarily set on top of it while you locate the queen.
• Stage 3 — Move the queen down, add the excluder. The queen (ideally with one frame of open comb) goes into the new bottom box, and a queen excluder is placed above her. She can no longer reach the brood nest.
• Stage 4 — Reassemble. The supers go back in above the excluder, and the original brood box — now queenless — goes on the very top. The colony is whole again, but restructured.

Controls

• Manipulation step — scrub through the five stages of the split; boxes animate into their new positions.
• Days since queen moved — advances the brood cycle after Stage 3/4: the queen's new box fills with fresh eggs while the relocated brood box empties as bees emerge, roughly 21 days end to end.
• Exploded spacing — pulls the boxes apart vertically and horizontally so you can see each one clearly; set it to 0 to see the hive fully reassembled.
• ▶ Auto-play steps — steps through Stage 0 → 4 automatically. ↺ Reset view restores the camera. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

Because the queen resumes laying immediately on empty comb, a Demaree split resets a colony's swarm impulse without losing a single forager — the entire adult workforce stays in one hive, just rearranged.