Chuck Wettergreen said: > This is all well and good, but what if that brood > frame is full of honey, or has some brood in it? Do > you just take it anyway and melt it out? If you want to do this, you have to move frames around whenever you can. I think the best time is in early spring when there is less brood. (If you have drawn comb in good quantity, you CAN swap combs in fall, but I would not replace drawn comb with bare foundation in late fall, for obvious reasons.) But yeah - if your hives are packed with stores and brood, it is simply too late in the game to pull frames, and you are going to skip a year. This is not the end of the world. The colors simply reveal the ages of the frames. So, you have a brood box. Where do you put new or recycled frames of foundation? I slide them into the center of the box, or as close to the center as I can without breaking up the brood sphere. If you do this consistently, the oldest frames end up towards the edges of the box, and can be removed early in the next season with minimal risk of removing brood or stores. But what if the whole box contains comb of the same age? (Makes sense, as a new beekeeper will start with nothing more than a package and foundation.) Here, you have to look at the frames, and simply designate 1 or 2 of every 10 frames as "the worst", and get them moved to the edges of the box when you can, just to get the ball rolling. But you don't have to really do much of anything for the first few years. Just start putting tacks on NEW frames, so you don't end up with 20-year old brood comb. Existing in-service frames can be judged on the merits. I'm not suggesting using a hammer to sink a tack into a frame that is covered with bees, as I don't think the bees would like that very much. :) I start packages and splits in one or two "mediums", so when the time comes to add a second medium, they are nearly certain to have all their foundation drawn out. I then will add pre-drawn comb that was used for honey supers. These combs are clearly "older", so they get tacks assigned to them based on appearance of age, but are arbitrarily designated as at least one year older than the current year. Comb is arranged between the two boxes to keep the brood in the center, but any newly-drawn comb from the first supers that do NOT contain brood is moved up to the upper supers, and placed in the center, as it is "newer". The result is 2 to 4 boxes with a mix of old and new comb, all with pretty colors indicating which one is what one and what one is who. (Lather, rinse, and repeat for whatever number of brood boxes make up your standard colony.) And I'm NOT claiming that replacing two combs of each ten every year is really required. There are lots of colors out there, so one could set up a system based upon 10 colors rather than 5, and only replace 1 comb per box per year. I stuck with 5 colors simply because I have a large stack of supers from which to draw comb, and this gives me a way to (re)use frames that were not fully drawn out to optimal depth for 9-frame supers. From what I've read, 5 years worth of residue build-up from the miticides might even be "too much" for optimal brood raising. If this turns out to be the case, I guess I'd start trying to pull two colors at a time. But I do think that every colony needs to draw SOME new comb every year, and not just cap and repair. In early spring, you've got all these very young bees that have nothing better to do than hang by their thumbs and draw comb. Might as well give them something productive to do. Wait a second - bees have THUMBS??? Well, look here, and you decide: http://www.qsl.net/kg4qdz/beefoot.jpg Looks like a thumb to me. It even looks like an "opposed thumb". jim :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: -- Visit www.honeybeeworld.com/BEE-L for rules, FAQ and other info --- ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::