# Would you use used drawn out frames?



## McCoslin (Dec 4, 2013)

I was given about 50 frames that are drawn out from a large commercial outfit in CA to help me get started in Beekeeping. I guess I'm a little worried about using them after reading about pesticides, diseases etc. I also read that you can throw the frames in the freezer for a couple of days, then store them in air-tight containers (moths) and use them. The guys told me to put a couple of the drawn out frames in each hive and that would help get a hive started. 

I am planning to use some of the frames in bait hives. My second question is if I am successful with a bait hive, would you quarantine and treat before adding the hive to your apiary? 

Your thoughts?


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## gmcharlie (May 9, 2009)

Actualy freeze, then sunshine. UV light kills things best. But it won't kill pesticides on them. 
That said, there a great start, I would use them myself.


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## Rader Sidetrack (Nov 30, 2011)

If it is pesticides that you are concerned about, freezing the frames won't help. Freezing will kill wax moth larva, but won't help if the combs were tainted with AFB.

My opinion is that it would be worthwhile to use the gifted combs to start out with, but rotate them out after your bees build adequate comb.


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## WWW (Feb 6, 2011)

I agree, they would be a great start as a boost to a new hive, you can always rotate them out in a year or two.


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## Grant (Jun 12, 2004)

McCoslin said:


> My second question is if I am successful with a bait hive, would you quarantine and treat before adding the hive to your apiary?
> 
> Your thoughts?


Quarantine for what? You're in CA and I'm in Missouri. Thus far, **knock on wood**, we have not seen AHB. Don't know if that's a problem for you.

Varroa will travel with a swarm and at one time it was thought to be a good idea to put Apistan strips in your swarm trap. Tests proved they were not a deterant to the swarm choosing the trap as the new home. I'm not crazy about this idea. I do have problems with SHB moving into swarm traps with a swarm, especially later in the season for swarming. But I don't treat swarms, generally don't treat much at all, anyway.

I don't worry about disease. Any colony strong enough to swarm is pretty healthy. If anything, I put all my swarms into one yard so I can insure the queen is laying. Virgins coming with "after" swarms sometimes fail to return after the mating flight. Once everything is looking good, and before they get too big, I move the colony out to a production yard to make some honey.

Grant
Jackson, MO Swarm Trapping https://www.createspace.com/4106626


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## marshmasterpat (Jun 26, 2013)

I can PM you my email address if you don't want them so they can ship them to me, heck I might consider paying for slow ground freight. :lpf:

I am new and don't know if they would be a danger to use, but they would be going into my hive.


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## McCoslin (Dec 4, 2013)

Thanks all for your comments, I really appreciate it! 

Grant.. good point regarding Virgins after swarming.

Thanks!


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## JRG13 (May 11, 2012)

They're not going to be tainted with anything that is a new exotic disease or something you might get anyways, I'd use them to get things rolling. You will learn the value of these things as you progress, drawn comb is like gold at times...


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Once you use them they will stay in your hives for the normal life span of a frame of comb, unless rotating them out is your goal and you can resist their continued use. Once you have used them and gotten your bees well on their way why would you rotate them out? If they serve their purpose they will probably continue to do so relatively ad infinitum.


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## WWW (Feb 6, 2011)

McCoslin said:


> I guess I'm a little worried about using them after reading about pesticides, diseases etc.


Mark, the suggestions to rotate the old comb out was in response to his concerns of contamination. I do agree with you in that if they function okay in the hive i would be in no hurry to rotate them out.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

I understand. All I am saying is that once you use them it will be really hard to stop using them. Not that I am saying don't use them. I have purchased or been given comb in boxes and still have what hasn't deteriorated beyond use.

It's a crap shoot.


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## WWW (Feb 6, 2011)

Yeah I hear you, I have a few combs that are a pain in the butt because they are not wired, however their usefulness outweighs the pain.


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## McCoslin (Dec 4, 2013)

sqkcrk said:


> Once you use them they will stay in your hives for the normal life span of a frame of comb, unless rotating them out is your goal and you can resist their continued use. Once you have used them and gotten your bees well on their way why would you rotate them out? If they serve their purpose they will probably continue to do so relatively ad infinitum.


Based on what I've heard I'm going to use them to jump-start my packages. I agree..... if the frames work out I don't see why they wouldn't stay.


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## JellyB (Jan 6, 2014)

I sold all of my old brood frames and drawn comb to a guy that raises Wax worms for fishing bait. paid for half of my new ones.


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## Kamon A. Reynolds (Apr 15, 2012)

Rader Sidetrack said:


> If it is pesticides that you are concerned about, freezing the frames won't help. Freezing will kill wax moth larva, but won't help if the combs were tainted with AFB.
> 
> My opinion is that it would be worthwhile to use the gifted combs to start out with, but rotate them out after your bees build adequate comb.


This is exactly what i would do build the population up then cycle the combs out in bits.


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## sweetas (Apr 16, 2012)

would agree with gmcharlie


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## Kamon A. Reynolds (Apr 15, 2012)

Bees are really good at making comb during the pre flow. I always remove acouple pollen/honeyfilled combs from my honey producing colonies and add new frames for them to draw out. Helps me get new wax and help gives the queen more space to lay.

Also my wife sells ,soaps, lipbalms, salves, balms for babies, and other honeycomb products. 

I personally have a big problem in the case of selling miticide laden comb products to mothers for their childrens eczema.

It is as personal choice. I like to opt for quality over quantity.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Kamon Reynolds said:


> Also my wife sells ,soaps, lipbalms, salves, balms for babies, and other honeycomb products.
> 
> I personally have a big problem in the case of selling miticide laden comb products to mothers for their childrens eczema.
> 
> It is as personal choice. I like to opt for quality over quantity.


Then maybe you should reconsider selling beeswax based products all together because whether you put chemicals in your hives or not your beeswax is not void of chemical pollutants gathered by bees. It's a matter of degree.


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## Moots (Nov 26, 2012)

sqkcrk said:


> Then maybe you should reconsider selling beeswax based products all together because whether you put chemicals in your hives or not your beeswax is not void of chemical pollutants gathered by bees. It's a matter of degree.


While we all know that chemical pollutants can end up in bees wax as a result of what the bees might gather. All research that I've seen clearly confirms that the overwhelming amount of chemical pollutants found in beeswax is the result of what is placed in the hives by the beekeeper.

So technically, while it may be a matter of "degree" the differences are huge...At least, that's my understanding!


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

To what degree do beekeeper applied chems effect anyone by burning beeswax candles? How are those chemicals effected by burning?

Over on bee-L Jerry Bromenshenk has written, under "wax", some interesting things about chemicals in honeycomb.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

If level of contamination below detectable levels is the ideal, since zero ppm is unattainable, what amount above the lowest detectable level is acceptable? Is it different for different chemicals? Are any of you doing the detection work on your wax?


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## WWW (Feb 6, 2011)

Mark,
This subject has been a curiosity to me; if a person wanted to check their combs for chemical contaminants is there a way to do it yourself or does one need to send pieces of comb to a laboratory?


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

The way I understand things is that Lab analysis for specific chemicals is the way chemical contamination is detected. I don't know how one would do that at home or in the field.


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## WWW (Feb 6, 2011)

It would be a good thing to send a few pieces to a lab just to see how the combs check out, then a person would know for sure what they are dealing with where contamination is concerned, but I suppose that you would need to inform the lab as to what specific chemicals you are looking for unless they have a broad spectrum test.


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## sqkcrk (Dec 10, 2005)

Here's the bee-L Post that I mentioned earlier.

We looked at uptake, transport, partitioning, and fate of a wide variety of inorganic and organic chemicals into honey bee colonies from 1974 till the current time. In the 70s and 80s, EPA and DOE funded our work on using bees as sentinels and monitors for hazardous substances -and in the 90s we added harmful biological agents for DoD.

Simply stated, wax is a sink - all kinds of things end up in wax, and some may persist for years or decades. How does it get there? Via numerous routes - directly from hive atmospheres (gaseous materials and fine particulates), from the bees themselves, from water, from nectar, from propolis. Some contaminants sorb onto the surface of the bee body; a combination of electrostatic charge levels on the bee and particle size play a role - we've published models of this.

Chemical uptake into the hive and colony components can be very fast - in heavy metal laden areas near heavy industry, bee colonies moved onto a polluted site quickly change in terms of residues levels so fast that we couldn't really track the change - we expected it to take days, and thought we were being conservation by sampling hourly, but within a half day or less, the new colonies (hours of exposure) closely resembled the resident colonies (weeks of exposures).

A major pathway of entry and transfer was from foragers, especially pollen gatherers, to nurse bees, and into the brood nest. 

Contaminated wax is dynamic - partitioning can go both ways. Wax has some benefits for pollution monitoring (whether industrial, urban, agrichemical, etc.) and some big downsides. The plus is that wax can retain stable chemicals like metals and some organics for years, providing an historical (retrospective) viewpoint. But, when that chemical came into the hive is hard to determine - last week, last month, last year, last decade? Also, comb is EXTREMELY variable in terms of chemical dispersion across the comb surfaces and in cells. Bees use cells over and over, and what's in any cell varies from week to week - brood, pollen, nectar, empty. There are always sampling chemical HOT SPOTS in comb. A few cells may have an extreme outlier value - this is a reason researchers shouldn't just publish the 95% outliers - ask instead what was the mean, mode, how many samples were outliers, what was the overall distribution of values - were the concentrations normally distributed or were they skewed? I've often found a pocket of a few cells that are extreme outliers, clearly not representative of any comb in the hive.

We found it best to sample lots of places on combs and/or several combs, or often better, process whole combs for analysis, if you really want to get a profile of the chemical concentrations.

But sampling problems and concentration values are even worse than just differential concentrations over any comb. The levels and chemicals can change from comb to comb - think about comb age and comb usage, and rotation, moving of combs by beekeepers. Brood combs are different than honey combs. Old versus new comb, bottom versus top of the hive, it all changes.

The most interesting data was that bees move wax. When they need lots of comb fast, such as in the middle of a honey flow, they may harvest wax from new comb being drawn out and use it on old comb to rebuild, repair, or draw cells out deeper. So, old contaminated comb may get a bit cleaner from dilution with newer wax (and loss of contaminant is not necessarily going into the brood, although some may be) as a result of this reconstruction. And, new drawn comb itself can disappear or be undrawn. In the brood nest, the lining and re-lining of brood cells, that most members of Bee-L know can seal in biological agents like spores from foul brood, may help seal off some of the contaminants, but as with spores that can survive for years, at some time, as cells get smaller, the bees may decide to tear down and rebuild - releasing both pathogens and chemicals. And then if you've got an intermittent exposure source, like emissions from a smokestack during an inversion or an incident like planting dust or chemigation, you can get a rapid influx of chemical into a colony, the hive, and wax. So, keep track of time of year, weather, and what's going on in the surroundings.

For environmental monitoring, we concluded that the only valid way to use wax for monitoring was to use wax of a known source, chemistry, and age. Old comb is nearly impossible to interpret - hot spots, age, stage of rebuild, partitioning, its just a messy system. What is representative of true values of exposure to bees? How to sample, how to deal with the huge variability, where and when did it get contaminated? - mostly unanswerable. At best, a measured concentration of something says at some time, the comb was exposed to x,y, z chemical.

About the only way comb and wax can realistically be used to assess the ebb and flow of chemicals into and out of wax is by starting the experiment with clean (chemically analyzed) wax, inserted into the hive on a known and recorded date. Sometimes we used full foundation sheets, sometimes we use wax foundation strips. These then become the sampling matrix, a sort of trap, that will pick up things being brought in as well as some transfer of materials already resident in the hive (from bees, from older comb). Its generally cost prohibitive to start with all new comb, but if you are looking at wax contamination during a specific window of time, at least use new, clean wax. It will get 'dirty' soon enough.

J.J. Bromenshenk
Bee Alert
Missoula, Mt

http://community.lsoft.com/scripts/...38CD5A&[email protected]&P=165563


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