Yes cull your combs!
This is not a question to be answered by Master's Degree thesis papers, this
is simple, prudent, proactive "self-defense" in the marketplace.
1) You are a businessperson.
2) You sell food for human consumption.
3) The food is created by... yecch! Bugs! So, you are already fighting an
uphill battle.
4) Unlike all other food producers, you are subjected to almost no
government regulation, oversite, or monitoring.
5) Clean matters, and so does the APPEARANCE and tangible EVIDENCE of clean.
Do you want to show a potential volume honey buyer or health inspector those
old brood combs in those brood boxes you bought from old One-Eyed
Johansson's widow back in '88?
To quote Clint Eastwood, "Do ya feel lucky, punk?... Do ya?"
I have rotated all my brood combs on a strict 2-frames per brood box (100%
replacement every 5 years) using queen-color thumbtacks on each frame, since
the 1990s. This is far easier at the hobby scale than it was with 600-700
colonies, but it was not any more difficult than the management and
maintenance of 9-frame honey supers "at scale".
[Jerry] > DDT, DDE, DDD residues...
This is something else that rotating comb avoids... the "worst case
scenario".
There is no newspaper headline that could kill sales faster or for longer
than "DDT Found In Honey!". Don't bother with "details" or "facts" here,
this is pure emotion.
And I did find some.
I never had any reward but the warm glow of satisfaction in knowing that my
bees lived on "clean" comb, and a nice certificate hanging on the wall
attesting that half of my colonies that were "Demeter Certified" years
before anyone but health food store owners knew the term "Biodynamic".
But decades later, and 500 miles North, the practice proved its value.
We ran across one pair of backyard hives in Brooklyn that tested with
significant DDT, and its DDE/DDD metabolized breakdown products. Scary.
There had been a widespread and disastrous bee kill in late-spring foraging,
so we sampled all the hives we could around the worst-hit hives to find the
highest concentrations of imidacloprid, and create a "search area". The
kill was well past even the end of the basswood bloom, so we were looking
for a rose garden with lots of late-bloomers - clearly someone bought a
concentrate, and did a ground drench without diluting the stuff at all.
Likely a saintly little old lady who could not make out the infuriatingly
tiny print of the instructions, not even with her bifocals. We found her,
and we even found the bottle. Yep, she was a lovely lady, with a fabulous
rose garden.
But we got back DDT hits on two side-by-side hives that were not showing any
evidence of a pesticide kill. The lab was the USDA AMS lab in Gastonia, so
we knew that the work was top-notch. But why JUST those hives, and no
others? The hives were at a home with small kids... was it from the forage,
from water, maybe in the soil around the hives? Bees can thrive under even
a very high load of DDT - they don't seem to mind it at all. We were
worried about the family, so they sampled their yard, their water...
nothing.
All we could surmise was that someone had a gardener who was an immigrant
from Asia, and he/she sent back home for some of the "good stuff", being
unhappy with the less "effective" pesticides available in the USA, and these
two hives alone foraged on the blooms of that DDT-treated garden. So the
honey from those hives was extracted and destroyed, out of an abundance of
caution.
We had lots of samples - dead bees, live bees, honey in comb, brood comb
from each of a good number of hives, as the Bayer corporation was nice
enough to offer to pay all the lab fees to help us prove that this was a
clear MISuse of their <snarky> Fine Pesticide Products </snarky>, and the
lab fees were not cheap. So we knew that all the surrounding hives had zero
DDT hits.
So how to deal with the risk of someone sending a future honey sample out
for toxin testing, as some of the health food stores said that they randomly
did, and then calling the newspaper with a scare story?
How to keep an entire community of beekeepers risk and liability as low as
possible?
We were already doing the best we could, as most of us were rotating brood
combs on strict schedule.
Many poisons, like DDT, are hydrophobic - DDT is almost insoluble in water,
but wax absorbs it.
Others are hydrophilic - easily soluble in water, not in oils. Wax repels
them.
And these are the only two choices in this life - "water" or "oil" soluble.
(There are the exceptions like mercury, molten phosphorus, and gallium, but
these are rarely encountered in the wild).
Beeswax is very very very absorbent of oils. So, if one rotates one's brood
combs, one has eliminated a wide swath of potential poisons that have
invariably accumulated in one's brood combs.
Now the guys who design and make pesticides are much more worried about
keeping their poisons out of the groundwater than they are about impact on
pollinators, so (as a general rule) they are going to make everything they
can hydrophobic, and encapsulate the stuff that has to be hydrophilic. This
is nothing but good prudent engineering - keep the pesticide where the
applicator put it, don't let it wash away with the rain, and end up in
drinking water wells and all over the front pages of newspapers. (The
pesticides that are claimed to rapidly break down in water, such as
imidacloprid, are a different breed, and I think it has become clear to all
that this claimed self-destruct mechanism is more cartoon than reality,
which is how it ended up on the front pages of newspapers, Q.E.D.)
So, if you rotate your brood combs, you are eliminating the build-up of at
least a wide swath, if not the majority of the poisons out there. (I dunno
the ratio of hydrophobic to hydrophilic poisons in the current set).
But most important of all, we harvest and sell food for human consumption
with almost no sampling/testing/safety technology at all. (I may be the
only beekeeper to have ever owned a personal HPLC/MS, which for bees kept in
the midst of a massive national forest was about as needed as the "9" button
on a microwave, but I love toys, and VA Tech had this amazing annual "yard
sale"...)
More than anything else , beekeeping is the art of doing the ethical thing,
the prudent thing, the "right thing", especially when no one is watching.
Every jar of honey has to be one that we'd be happy to randomly pull out of
a case, and hand to our grandmother.
There may be some who want to ride some sort of "cost/benefit" curve in
their own operations, but this is a corrosive process, that ends up with
"value engineering", and products just barely compliant with minimum
standards, landfill-ready stuff. (I'll tell you were all that crap started,
because I was there - it was 1979. The first freshly-minted MBAs,
self-styled "strategic planners" brought an Apple II computer running Dan
Bricklin's "VisiCalc" into the office. The first spreadsheet program. They
ran "what if" analysis, and began spouting nonsense like "better ROI" and
"Earnings Per Share" if we closed a factory, laid off all the workers who
had spent decades learning how to proudly make the best products they could,
and outsource production to someone else who would never care as much about
quality. We should have taken those marketing deewbs out in the parking
lot, assembled a firing squad, and nipped the whole mess in the bud. It was
the beginning of the end. It is why I still exclusively use things like a
toaster older than I am - the Sunbeam T-35. Utterly silent, no "pop" at
all, perfect toasting, retro-futuristic enough for any decor.)
TL;DR - we beekeepers sell food, and we already have the problem of a close
association with an insect, and no one wants an insect anywhere near their
food, so we have to constantly play catch-up on the whole sanitation and
purity thing. Don't miss an opportunity to remove crud from the process.
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