> the historical levels of comb contaminants, 

To which data did you refer?  I didn't know of much history" prior to the
large-scale studies done by MaryAnn.  There are drips and dribbles of data
here and there, but I've never seen enough to allow a conclusion.  

> as well as seeing that some of the most 
> successful beekeepers that I know produce 
> huge abundances of excess bees for sale 
> each year on such contaminated combs,

I think it would be more accurate to say that, after pulling hives out of
the almonds, beekeepers who do not migrate elsewhere for another pollination
placement or a honey crop can split those hives into nucs for sale to
beekeepers outside the rough-and-tumble of pollination.  Regardless if the
bees are shaken into packages or sold as nucs, it would be hard to tell if
the lifespans of these bees might be somehow foreshortened by any impact
from the almonds, as spring package and nuc bees tend to work hardest, and
have the briefest lifespans of any bee scenario.  

> I realized that I needed to weigh the 
> evidence more carefully.

Here's some evidence already weighed - the weight difference tracked between
colonies with what Tom Seeley considers a "natural amount of drone comb",
20%, and colonies with minimal drone comb.

"The effect of drone comb on a honey bee colony's production of honey"
Thomas D. Seeley
Apidologie 33 (2002) 75-86
http://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/pdf/2002/01/Seeley.pdf
or
http://tinyurl.com/lqpoeoz

For those producing honey for sale, culling out brood comb more rapidly than
the leisurely 5 year cycle I use may be very worthwhile.  Note that Seeley
found his bees converting worker cells to drone-sized cells at rates
anywhere from 4% (when hives were provided with 20% drone comb) to 23% (when
drone comb was nearly eliminated), so the immediate and tangible benefits of
persistent regular culling out of drone comb is clear.  Waiting until one
sees brood dying in noticeable numbers to replace a brood comb is waiting
far too long, in my view.

> As it happens, I recently ran an experiment to 
> quantify that cost, in lbs of sugar syrup.

The experiment neglected a few factors, some of them with the potential to
swamp out the calculations presented:

a)  The issue of honey yield, per Tom Seeley above, which swamps out the
entire "cost" calculated by at least an order of magnitude.

b)  The issue of Nature, where a certain number of bees are going to burn up
a certain amount of carbohydrates to make a certain amount of wax anyway, no
matter what, implying that we might as well allow them to put that effort to
some productive use, rather than making burr comb, or dropping the wax
scales on the bottom board.  So much of the "fuel cost" cited is going to be
burned either way, and it seems simplistic to assign it to the drawing of a
frame of comb.

c)  The issue of efficiency, as nothing gets drawn out faster than a frame
of foundation put into a brood chamber in early spring.

> Assuming that we can work a drawn extracted honey frame
> down in order to replace the rotated out brood comb, 
> we should look at cost of replacement of that honey comb.

The above would be the worst possible scenario in drawing comb.  If a frame
of foundation is placed into the brood chamber in early spring, the bees can
kill two birds with one stone, and both heat the broodnest, and take
advantage of some of that heat to draw comb.  This is perhaps why frames are
so quickly drawn out in the brood chamber in early spring, but are so slowly
drawn out up in the honey supers.  The difference is the extra energy
required to create heat away from the broodnest versus in/near the
broodnest, where heat is required 24x7 in spring.

Further, one would be sacrificing valuable drawn honey-super comb, which
would require running it through the uncapper to rip it down from 9-frame
thickness to 10-frame thickness.  (Running 9-frame honey supers is roughly a
10% cost savings across the board for a honey producer, as the same amount
of honey is produced in 9/10ths the frames, so one would do this long before
working out the cost of replacing brood comb.)  The loss of that much
thicker honey comb would be a much larger loss than the direct replacement
of one (thinner) 10-frame brood frame with another.

Yes, it is a great gift to give a novice a box of pearly white drawn honey
super comb in which to start a package, as the population never dips like
one started on foundation, but this is a morale booster for the new
beekeeper, not a pragmatic business decision about what to do with honey
super combs.

> To me, a "scientific approach" also involves 
> trusting what you observe in the field with 
> your own eyes.

But the observer's eyes alone are never to be trusted; this is why
statistical analysis is so important as a way to differ between mere
appearances and tangible objective reality, confirmed at a measurable level
of certainty. 

> Surprisingly, I found that there was little 
> difference in whether the sugar syrup was 
> fed as 71% solids, or if diluted to half that
> rate.

I'd expect the thinner syrup to have resulted in faster utilization in the
context of comb drawing, as the bees are going to have to dilute the feed to
something "edible" to a bee. The 71% solids will require more water
foragers, and more house bee work to get the thicker syrup diluted down to
edible "nectar" levels.  



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