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Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology

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Subject:
From:
Mike Rossander <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Informed Discussion of Beekeeping Issues and Bee Biology <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 11 Mar 2009 11:56:46 -0700
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Waldemar asked about scraping or otherwise refurbishing the one-piece Pierco plastic frames.  I've tried a couple of techniques, none completely satisfactory.
 
I first tried melting the wax and gunk off in the solar wax melter.  Don't do that.  Sturdy as the plastic frames are, they warped in the heat into some really interesting shapes.  And at the temperature that they were warping, the wax still hadn't completely melted off.
 
Next, I tried scraping but as you said, that doesn't get all the debris out, so I tried hitting it with a pressure washer.  The shape of the comb is amazingly effective at focusing the spray back at the person holding the washer.  After a thorough soaking, the results weren't that good anyway.  The cells immediately under the strongest part of the spray were clean but it would have required almost a row-by-row spray to get the frame completely clean.
 
Next, tried scraping and just putting the frames back.  The bees were a bit slow to draw them out but that's a known limitation of plastic foundation, not unique to scraped frames that I can tell.   The problem I found was that the act of scraping leveled off the foundation to a smooth glaze.  The bees had essentially no cues for the drawing of foundation.  I had a higher-than-usual incidence of burr comb and drone comb on those frames.
 
I mentioned all this to Kim Flottum one day and he asked what my time was worth.  Compared to the time and energy I was spending, new frames are cheap.  Now I'm back to the solar melter just to reclaim whatever fraction of wax is available, then the warped frame goes to the recycle bin.  (We can recycle that grade of plastic in my neighborhood.)  I'll still scrap down a patch when necessary but don't bother with the full frame anymore.  For drone brood removal, I freeze rather than scrape the drone combs.

I'm not sure that any of my techniques would scale to a commercial keeper.
 
Mike Rossander
www.rossander.org/infosec


      

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