> Many beekeepers and researchers are now recommending getting rid
> of combs that are more than a few years old. Personally, I think 
> this is extreme, since it hasn't really been shown that old 
> equipment causes disease, per se.

This specific issue likely has no bearing on the CCD problem, but
it has been shown that empty brood combs certainly can have detectable
levels of EFB bacteria, AFB spores, and (I recall hearing) a number
of the different bee viruses.

While it may be true that no one has bothered to run a study to 
verify beyond all doubt under controlled conditions that the transfer 
of empty brood comb alone (rather than a comb with brood) can transfer 
diseases, I think we can take this as "obvious", at least for the 
easy one - EFB.  It was a long hard slog to get doctors to wash their 
hands between sessions with patients.  I hope that beekeepers can realize 
that hygienic beekeepers are just as important as hygienic bees from that
bit of history.

The beekeepers that make a habit of having their supers irradiated
are voting with their wallets on this issue, a very strong endorsement 
from a group that tends to carry around Vice-Grips so that they can 
pinch pennies harder.  There is also the all-too common tale of woe
involving buying used equipment, and the resulting loss of colonies
housed in that equipment, an object lesson that is "common knowledge".
The steady stream of dismayed beekeepers reporting problems with old 
equipment tends to provide a fairly compelling set of evidence that 
the old equipment was the proximate cause of the diseases they saw 
emerge from initially healthy bees.

The "problem" isn't the wax itself as much as the nooks and crannies
where gunk can collect, so one should not speak just about the comb.
The frames and boxes also need to be "sterilized", and in the US,
the toy that every state association wants for Christmas is a
trailer-mounted autoclave.

Now that molecular biology is being applied to bee research, we are
able to detect even viruses anywhere we'd care to look, so maybe the 
CCD-related work will prove or refute the matter in regard to comb itself.

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