>Dear Bee Folks - Thus far my comment about letting the bees clean out the
>supers that I stacked up in the woods has brought several comments:
>l) This is a good way to spread pathogens.
>2) Why do I want to clean them out? ( Stan)
>3) I don't like to leave mine wet cuz they get moldy (Rick)
>
>My thinking on the matter after this discussion is
>l) This worries me. But what are my options?
 
SIMPLE!!
 
Let YOUR bees clean them up inside their own hive.  That way you know the
you are not feeding all the feral colonies in the bush as well (and losing a
lot of honey).
You can even strengthen the weaker colonies getting them to do all the cleaning.
 
The trick is how to get the bees to clean up stickies in the hive without
using them for storage.
 
My preferred method for this is :-
 
1) Put an inner cover (with an access whole in it) over the top supper.
2) Put 1 empty supper over the inner cover.
3) Put a supper with stickies over the empty supper)
4) Normal lid over the top
 
The bees will "rob" the stickies very quickly and bring it all down to their
normal storage.
 
The empty supper is important.  It convinces the bees that the stickies are
not part of the hive and that should not use them for storage.
 
The inner cover (with access whole) may help in this deception but is
probably less important.  However, as the bees rob the stickies, they can
drop quite a lot debris.  The inner cover will catch the debris.
 
Trap for new players
The bees will clean the "sticky" from the stickies in just a few days.
After all the "sticky" has been cleaned up, you will still see bees busy on
the "clean stickies".  This may give you the false impression the stickies
are still "sticky".
Regards
 
Chris Allen