This was posted on the forum at www.honeybeeworld.com/forum and I thought it worth posting here for comment.  My initial thoughts follow the quote:

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I have read of other sterilizing combs by spraying a 10% bleach solution on old combs and boxes. Ozone is supposedly a better sterilizer than bleach. It's my understanding that many parts of Europe sterilize drinking water with ozone instead of chlorine.

Has anyone tried sterilizing old combs and boxes with ozone? You can pick up an ozone purifier for hot tubs or aquariums on eBay for $100. If you pumped the ozone into an old chest freezer, you could gas 8 or 10 boxes at once.

Has anyone tried this? How much ozone production do you need to be effective and how long would you need to gas boxes? Or would it be better (more practical) to ozonate the water you mix the 10% bleach solution with and mist combs and boxes?

If you could sterilize combs and boxes in a reasonable amount of time, this might be practical for a sideliner beekeeper. (A commercial beekeeper would likely need one of the larger ozone generator models so they could gas a whole storage room at once.)

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Interesting idea. Gasses are easier to handle in many ways, especially common and disposable ones. Maybe not in California, though.

ETO (Ethylene Oxide gas) was used here in Alberta and Manitoba for a while. Alberta had a huge mobile unit which did 500 boxes at a time. Its use was discontinued due to concerns about the reactivity of ETO and the unknown and potential toxic or carcinogenic by-products possible when placing painted wooden boxes nailed with galvanized nails with beeswax and honey and pollen together with ETO under pressure. Moreover, the process was not completely reliable, since any honey or pollen in frames impeded penetration by the gas. There was always, also, concern for operator safety. ETO is explosive and also it dissipates slowly and the operator must remove the boxes from the chamber at some point. ETO was superseded by electron beam radiation, which is now the sanitizing method of choice in Alberta and BC. It also has problems with penetration if there is much pollen or honey in the combs.

Ozone on a small scale is different from ETO, but can still be dangerous to the operator. Wikipedia -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone -- says: 

"Due to the strongly oxidizing properties of ozone, ozone is a primary irritant, affecting especially the eyes and respiratory systems and can be hazardous at even low concentrations. The Canadian Center for Occupation Safety and Health reports that: "Even very low concentrations of ozone can be harmful to the upper respiratory tract and the lungs. The severity of injury depends on both by the concentration of ozone and the duration of exposure. Severe and permanent lung injury or death could result from even a very short-term exposure to relatively low concentrations."]"


Using O3 on a small scale could be practical, though, especially since the generator may be cheap to buy and there are no consumables. If the chamber devised is small -- as suggested -- and there is no need to cycle many boxes through as quickly as practicable as there was with large facilities like the ETO chambers we had in Manitoba (stationary) and Alberta (mobile). O3 is heavier than air and clearing the device and the area of ozone before entering or handling boxes in the device would be the biggest concern I can see. A good fan should be able to accomplish this, I would think.

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