Chuck Wettergreen said:

> This is all well and good, but what if that brood
> frame is full of honey, or has some brood in it? Do
> you just take it anyway and melt it out?

If you want to do this, you have to move frames around
whenever you can.  I think the best time is in early
spring when there is less brood.  (If you have drawn
comb in good quantity, you CAN swap combs in fall, but
I would not replace drawn comb with bare foundation
in late fall, for obvious reasons.)

But yeah - if your hives are packed with stores and brood,
it is simply too late in the game to pull frames, and you
are going to skip a year.  This is not the end of the world.
The colors simply reveal the ages of the frames.

So, you have a brood box.  Where do you put new or recycled
frames of foundation?  I slide them into the center of the box,
or as close to the center as I can without breaking up the
brood sphere.

If you do this consistently, the oldest frames end up towards
the edges of the box, and can be removed early in the next
season with minimal risk of removing brood or stores.

But what if the whole box contains comb of the same age?
(Makes sense, as a new beekeeper will start with nothing
more than a package and foundation.)  Here, you have to
look at the frames, and simply designate 1 or 2 of every
10 frames as "the worst", and get them moved to the edges
of the box when you can, just to get the ball rolling.

But you don't have to really do much of anything for the
first few years.  Just start putting tacks on NEW frames,
so you don't end up with 20-year old brood comb.
Existing in-service frames can be judged on the merits.
I'm not suggesting using a hammer to sink a tack into a
frame that is covered with bees, as I don't think the bees
would like that very much.  :)

I start packages and splits in one or two "mediums", so when
the time comes to add a second medium, they are nearly
certain to have all their foundation drawn out.  I then will
add pre-drawn comb that was used for honey supers.  These combs
are clearly "older", so they get tacks assigned to them based
on appearance of age, but are arbitrarily designated as at
least one year older than the current year.  Comb is arranged
between the two boxes to keep the brood in the center, but any
newly-drawn comb from the first supers that do NOT contain
brood is moved up to the upper supers, and placed in the center,
as it is "newer".

The result is 2 to 4 boxes with a mix of old and new comb,
all with pretty colors indicating which one is what one and
what one is who.  (Lather, rinse, and repeat for whatever
number of brood boxes make up your standard colony.)

And I'm NOT claiming that replacing two combs of each ten
every year is really required.  There are lots of colors
out there, so one could set up a system based upon 10
colors rather than 5, and only replace 1 comb per box
per year.  I stuck with 5 colors simply because I have
a large stack of supers from which to draw comb, and
this gives me a way to (re)use frames that were not fully
drawn out to optimal depth for 9-frame supers.

From what I've read, 5 years worth of residue build-up
from the miticides might even be "too much" for optimal
brood raising.  If this turns out to be the case, I guess
I'd start trying to pull two colors at a time.

But I do think that every colony needs to draw SOME new comb
every year, and not just cap and repair.  In early spring,
you've got all these very young bees that have nothing better
to do than hang by their thumbs and draw comb.  Might as well
give them something productive to do.

  Wait a second - bees have THUMBS???
  Well, look here, and you decide:

   http://www.qsl.net/kg4qdz/beefoot.jpg

  Looks like a thumb to me.
  It even looks like an "opposed thumb".


                        jim

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