I melt the wax and use it for candles etc when I get enough. I clean up the frames with a hive tool. If there was no disease and I removed the frames from a healthy hive, I don’t do any more than that. If there is any suspicion of anything (wax moth, chalk brood, mould etc) I spray them liberally with dilute bleach and leave in the sun for a day or two. I replace any damaged parts, but then happily reuse them.
By the way, the survey from www.beeinformed.org is interesting for the effect of comb rotation on colony survival. It looks like keeping comb for 4-5 years might be a good option! Complicated story in there somewhere… Bee Informed Partnership - Management Survey
Click on Management Survey > Average Brood Comb Age
I don’t if there is brood there. I keep my bees warm way. i.e. the frames are parallel to the entrance and the brood tends to be in the front. I forgot you were all on Langs which are cold way so if the brood is at the front of the hive it will be on most frames. Hmmmmm back to the drawing board. As Dawn…she is good at getting frames drawn under the brood box. Move the queen down and put on an excluder? UK beekeepers do a Bailey comb change by putting the new frames on top and feeding
If you look at the settings above the graph, it defaults to “backyard” = hobby beekeeper. Probably reflects the treatment-free attitude of many hobbyists. If you change it to “Commercial”, you see a very different picture!
Mainly because you get disease and pesticide build up.
If we had neither of these you could leave the comb in. Bees like old comb and are quite capable of reengineering it to provide soft wax for queen cells. Contrary to what some old time stick-in-the-muds still maintain you do not get smaller bees as the cells get smaller, because thanks to those re-engineering skills, bees trim the old cocoons down.
Best change it every three years or so. A good rule of thumb for brood frame is if you hold it up to the light and can’t see through it, it has to go.
I agree with Dee. The main reason for removing the old combs for me is when the frames gets too much drone comb. You really want your combs to consist of predominantly worker comb. You’ll get a strong colony that way.
I guess I’m having trouble reconciling that Michael Bush (who seems to be quite experienced) never refreshes his brood comb but most others do. It seems that the majority of keepers replace the comb at some point between 3-5 years from what I can gather so far; so I guess I’ll do that.
Once I get more hives I might keep one with old brood comb and see what happens.
One good reason to refresh brood combs would be if you think that the colony would benefit after the exercise. If you don’t think that the colony would benefit, just leave it be.
PS, if you exercise good swarm prevention during spring, none of the original brood frames will be left by the end of it. Forget about 3-5 years.
Yeah OK, they are not destroyed, but they are out of the hive in question. Then if you sell nuclei, the old frames go with those - it helps to make the bees stay in the new location.
Alright, that is a bit cynical, but you can rotate frames efficiently as a diligent beekeeper, and the Bee Informed Partnership seems to have a view that experienced beekeepers can keep frames for 4 years+ with good results. As always in beekeeping, biology and medicine, it all depends on a number of factors.
No problems at all. It’s just that if you do a split (preemptive swarm control) at the start of spring & then another one towards the end of spring, there’s most-all of your brood frames refreshed in just a couple of months. I’m still doing them now (mid summer) to prevent swarming.
I did one this morning. I removed 5 frames of brood with bees. The brood frames had only been in the hive for a couple of months.
OK cool, thanks for the posts; makes more sense now. I was planning to pull 5 frames in August to prevent swarming and start a second hive. Sounds like I’ll have to do it a few times before the end of the year if they are going well.
