BIP: Beekeepers who kept their bees in colonies with brood comb of less than 2 years old reported significantly higher overwintering colony deaths than beekeepers who used brood comb older than 2 years.

I talked with someone from BIP about this. She said this "correlation" is an example of how difficult it is to interpret data. The immediate thought that new combs = lower survival completely overlooks other possibilities. It is likely the correlation is tied to something else entirely. 

My contention is that people that tend to throw out black combs constitute a subset of beekeepers. The corresponding observation that they have high losses may be tied to another feature of this subset: they are not doing other things that would increase survival.

The comb exchange is not a cause but an anomaly  which flags beekeepers that are not performing other more important management tasks which would increase the survival rate of their bees. This is simply one of the things they do and probably has no significant effect.

Peter L Borst

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