At 10:01 PM 10/18/98 +0100, you wrote:
>Following your discussion on Wax Moth it does not only go in used brood
>combs.  I have had a number of virgin cut comb supers badly infested with
>greater wax moth and have had to melt the comb to extract the honey from
>them.
 
Hi Peter & Friends,
 
Well if you were a wax moth full of eggs and the bees were after you it no
telling the places you would lay your eggs including nice sealed comb honey
and even new foundations. Commercial producers of comb honey have to
protect it from the moths and eggs hatching. One easy way is to keep it in
the freezer. In the olden days comb honey was shipped in tight wood boxes
to protect the honey from breakage and keep the moths out.
 
Wax moths come in many flavors. The major one here on the left coast of
America now is the grater wax moth, but we have smaller ones called lesser
wax moths, also called other names by other food product handlers. If you
have a good population of the greater's you seldom see the lesser's as the
greater's will eat them so it is said. Actually this is a good thing
because the lesser is much harder to get rid of and it very tolerant of
many agricultural chemicals because of their use in other food storage
problems.
 
The lesser is/was in the old days the dreaded pest of the comb honey
producer before extracted honey came into favor. All these moths produce
worms that bore through wax in search of proteins found in the pollen and
pupa cases left each time a bee hatches out of the brood combs. They do
well on pollen alone and are really IMHO pollen worms as they need no wax
to produce generations of more healthy moths and in fact will not produce
adults on wax alone. But they sure do damage the wax combs in searching out
their food.
 
It is interesting that their waste products as nasty as it looks can be
rendered into nice beeswax which indicates they do ingest wax but don't
change it much or get much out of it. This same nasty stuff will float on
honey and can be removed from the top of the honey with bits of wax and
wood, or strained out with the wire, nails, wood & paint chips, rocks, and
other extraneous inert stuff that pure raw honey contains down on the bee
farm.
 
ttul, the OLd Drone
Los Banos, California
http://beenet.com
 
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