Actually, I am fairly skeptical that any sort of sterilization or sanitization of combs will have the anticipated benefit. This attitude derives from an experiment we did at the Dyce Lab. We were struggling with chalk brood in the colonies, so we decided to have a bunch of equipment irradiated. 

It was quite an undertaking. We were told the boxes (we only did supers) had to be uniform in weight, bagged, and boxed. So, I obtained a real nice box from Kelley that was made for shipping deep supers. Then I got a very heavy plastic bag that just fit the supers. 

I weighed and shuffled combs around till we had several hundred supers with a few frames of honey in each, the rest empty comb. Getting the supers into the tight bags was a chore, but nothing compared to getting the bagged supers into the tight box. Finally, we hired a truck to take them to Massachusetts and bring them back. 

We subsequently installed packages into the equipment. (By the way, we sterilized the tops and bottoms with a bleach spray.) Bottom line, no improvement on the chalk brood front. My theory is that chalk brood spores are ubiquitous in the environment. Professor Calderone preferred the hypothesis that the spores came in with the bees. Point is, sterile equipment won't help if the source of the infection is elsewhere. 

Following that, it makes more sense to figure out how healthy organisms successfully combat infections, rather than to try to obtain a pathogen free environment (even if that were possible).

PLB

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