This is a paper on human viruses:

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2334-6-130

It shows many human viruses can survive on surfaces in the environment for hours to a couple of months.  At least in some cases higher humidity favors longer survival as does a non porous surface.  Lower temps favor longer survival.  That last point might be important to bee keepers as often the suggestion is to freeze combs from dead outs to store them.  In view of the wide range in survival times from virus to virus it is hard to draw any safe time conclusion for bees.  It surely seems possible that some viruses could be transmitted by reuse of comb from dead hives while for other viruses such reuse would be safe.

I found these results surprising as I had the impression viruses did not last anyplace close to this long in the environment.  Anecdotally, I have reused combs and not seen a problem.  This is probably a meaningless observation in a general sense.

Dick

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