So I had a tiny colony that a friend gave me (it was a cutout he attempted that never ended up having a queen). After several attempts to get them to make a queen with frames of eggs and larva, the colony sadly dwindled and died out. Along the way there was fairly bad chalkbrood. So now I am left with three frames of foundation which are fully drawn out, and even have quite a bit of pollen. The problem is that there is quite a number of chalkbrood mummies and capped brood that never hatched. Are these frames salvageable at all? It seems like a real waste to not use that drawn out comb
I would render them for wax. You can re-use the wood of the frames, but the rest may still have infectious spores. The heat of rendering should make the wax safe, depending on how you do it. I like the crock pot (slow cooker) method which you can find on this forum by using the Search tool at the upper right. Brood frames don’t always have a lot of wax though (lots of cocoons instead), so you might want to wait until you have a big enough batch.
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I agree to render those combs for the wax.
That colony was salvageable. It just required boosting with nurse bees, plus the brood frames to contain a lot more brood. The emerging bees from the brood itself bolsters the colony’s numbers. Therefore the more brood in each frame plus the frequency of adding them, can add up to a sizable colony, which can then combat chalkbrood.
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Thanks @Dawn_SD I suspected that would be the best option. A slow cooker was on my list of things to get anyway 
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Yeah I feel horrible that it ended like it did @JeffH
I made a lot of mistakes in the way I tackled it. I added three frames of BIAS in total, and some nurse bees, but clearly not enough. The worst part was, upon looking at the frames this morning, there were two queen cups that had two fully formed queens inside
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It’s all a big learning curve. Learning from experience can sometimes seem harsh, however it’s probably the best way to learn. We look back & think of what we could have done differently.
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If you are going to use it for cooking too, I would get some slow cooker liners (high temperature plastic bags) for melting wax. The wax is very difficult to get off the bowl after melting in the slow cooker and the bags help to keep it clean enough for cooking. Alternatively, you could buy a used one from a thrift shop etc, and only use it for wax. 
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