Hi Bill and Everyone,

I've found that clean comb is vital to colony health. When I placed bees
that had successfully survived on small cell into clean, large cell comb
hives, they had all the advantages attributed to small cell bees except for
mite tolerance. Clean comb is very important.

A couple of studies concerning colony survival were done in the Arizona
desert before the AHB and varroa arrived. Basically, few hives survived more
than 3 years. My own personal experience indicates about the same, so I
decided to use that as a useful lifetime for a brood comb.

That's an exceedly short time for a commercial brood frame in standard. And
expecially for one that is wired and embedded with wax foundation. Plastic
frames could be scraped. Wood frames would have to be reworked. Yuck!

It's a horrifically short time frame for a small cell beekeeper, as small
comb takes much longer and a good amount of culling to get drawn out. Hey,
all you small cell beekeepers, if you started small cell beekeeping before
2003, it's time to cull all that small cell comb and start again! :>)))

This was one of the factors that converted me to top bar hives. Comb
rotation and replacement is extremely easy in them.

Regards
Dennis

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