Re the present threads on burr comb on excluders and cleaning or not cleaning extracting equipment. Although the amount of burr comb varies from stock to stock, most of it is due to incorrect spacing. The space which the bees will respect has been known since the days of Langstroth and well made hives allow approximately one quarter of an inch between top bars and the wire of the excluder and another quarter inch between wire and the bottom bars of the super. If these gaps are too big or too small then you will get excessive burr comb. The same gap is necessary between supers. Frames are made to be a quarter inch less deep than the box they are in and that space can be either top or bottom. Generally it is at the top. Clearly mixing the two arrangements will result in no gap or a double gap with consequent glueing up or burr comb. I have seen excluders which have no frame, frame on both sides and frame on one side. Only the last one is suitable for a properly designed hive. Scraping an excluder to clean it is rather risky. I would suggest having a solar extractor big enough to take excluders. If you keep one or two excluders spare as replacements a day in the solar will clean it perfectly. Moreover it will sterilise it also ready for it to go on another hive. Mentioning sterilising leads me to another comment. I am surprised at the number of letter writers who appear to feed honey from one stock back to others. Disease (AFB, EFB, Chalk, Nosema, etc) is always lurking just down the road. Few beekeepers can discover it in its early stages and feeding honey indiscriminately is a sure way to spread it. With regard to leaving extracting equipment honey covered over a period it would be very unwise in my part of the world and yours too unless the atmosphere is very dry. Here, winter and summer, the relative humidity is such that exposed honey will take in water. Air- born yeasts,always present, will set up fermentation, hardly desirable for the next batch of extracting. Honey is acidic, fermentation will increase the acidity. Unless all your equipment is stainless steel or food grade plastic this could cause a reaction. Incidentally, I see that hot water is recommended for cleaning. Cold or warm water yes, hot no. It will melt any wax and propolis present, which will then be almost impossible to remove. Regards Sid P.