Doesn’t irradiating plastic make it brittle?
Yes, if you use too high a dose. Flow has a recommended dose and says that you can do it 3 times before the plastic starts to degrade. A company like Steritech needs to know that you have plastic Flow frames in the boxes, and I suppose it would a good idea to make sure that they know what the Flow recommended dose should be. I think I would also mark the frames with a Sharpie or similar, so that it was obvious that they have had a certain dose already.
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I take your point Jack that a heat gun may not destroy the spores if it is not applied long enough but at least the wood ware could encapsulated in wax as a barrier to the spores, or am I wrong?
Some time ago I found I couldn’t find wax dippers being made commercially in Australia, I guess thru a lack of demand. So a case of if you want one then make it as you have done. I would think anyone with one would not like to treat anything that wasn’t his own as it could be very regretted.
I agree with @Dawn_SD in that irradiating of any spores would kill the spores if it was done for enough time.
Cheers Peter
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I don’t know enough to say- I do imagine if you really blasted it thouroughly and put a lot of wax on it would either kill or encapsulate- but I don’t think any of the biosec/dept agri. people would be happy to sign off on it.
I don’t think I have ever seen an off the shelf wax dipper- people seem to make them themselves. basically they are just large steel tanks. I made mine a lot smaller- it is a ‘shallow fry’ dipper and you can only do one side of a box at atime or planks of wood before they are assembled. One day i will post a thread about it on the forum. It was a lot of work but I love dippign my hives (hate painting) and so far they are hlding up very well under the weather.
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Here’s a screenshot of the process according to the ag dept here in the West.
Note that using bees wax to dip is not permitted.
I’m not having issues that require notifying any gov. departments, I was just adding to the conversation Jack. What made me think of a heat gun as an option is that I have used mine to melt the wax off frames prior to rewiring and on low heat of the 3 settings the heat was fast and effective so I thought of it as an option to wax dipping.
Cheers Jack, Peter