Old Comb

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Beeswax comes in a variety of colours. There’s the bone-white pieces of comb a swarm begins making just to pass the time as they spend a day or two on a bush; the

creamy yellow of comb in the honey supers, having picked up the golden hues of its delicious cargo; the cinnamon brown of a solid wall of fresh brood comb… and the dark

mahogany chocolate of old old brood comb.

This last category you may encounter when a neighbour finally prevails upon you to check the hive they haven’t inspected in years, the dark comb by this point bulges out into buttresses of burr comb, concreting frames together, some cells look too small for bees, if you melt it down you’ll learn it’s seemingly all slumgum with a tiny fraction of actual wax remaining. And it is delicious, absolutely delicious, in the humble opinion of small hive beetles and wax moths, to whom it may as well be literal chocolate. It is primarily due to this last fact that I initially got in the habit of annually cycling old brood comb out. I came across a recent paper on the effects of comb age on queens which led me down a rabbit-hole of related studies on comb age effects and the findings convinced me that rotating out old brood comb is extremely worthwhile.

Let us begin with a 2020 study on “the relationship between comb age and performance of honey bee colonies”.1 This involved 20 hives at the Al-Ahsa oasis in Saudi Arabia. The hives were equalised for size (7 frames of bees) at the beginning of the study, requeened with mated sister queens, and then given drawn frames that were entirely the same age per hive, 1-4 years old. So some had entirely one year old comb, some had entirely 2, 3, or 4 year old comb, and all other variables were equalised as much as possible.

After three months, the hives with 1 year old comb had produced an average of 5.25kg of honey, 2 year: 4.90, 3 year: 4.65, 4 year 4.45kg, a clear correlation with the 4 year old comb hives making 15% less honey than the youngest comb. The four-year-old comb hives produced 19.7% less pollen and had 23.98% smaller populations.

ARTICLE BY KRIS FRICKE

Another study, in Egypt, which came out in 20212 divided colonies into groups with either combs aged 1-3 years or combs aged 4-6 years, and the study itself went on for a year. Again the hives were made as equal as possible and began with six frames of bees each. Newly emerged worker bees on the youngest comb were found to weigh an average of 114.89mg at the beginning of the study, comb a year older already reduced size by 5%, and the worker bees emerging from the now 5-7 year old comb at the end of the study weighed 78.21mg, only 68% the size of the newly emerging bees from young comb (and we’ll get to the effects of bees being smaller in a moment). The reason for this is of course that every time a bee pupates in brood comb a layer of its cocoon casing gets embedded into the wall, reducing the diameter of the cell by about 15% in four years. Bees in the hives with new comb put 67.18% more royal jelly in queen cells, produced 27.98% larger queens, stored 67.34% more pollen, and 88.83%

New comb (left) Old comb (right) Taha 2021.

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more honey. The paper authors hypothesise that the new comb hives produce more honey because the larger bees are more capable at collecting it, which brings us to the next study.

Another 2020 study3 in Egypt looked at the morphological effects on bees of being born into old comb. In the introduction alone to this paper there are some frightening descriptions of the reasons why old brood comb is darker and has smaller cells:

“Some contaminants are fungal and bacterial spores, pesticides and heavy metals (Berry and Delaplane 2001). Also older brood combs are more likely to contain hive debris and to have thicker propolis layers, which makes them darker colored (Koenig et al. 1986). In addition the diameters of the cells become narrow as the comb age increases because of the accumulation of silks and fecal materials produced by the developing larvae (Hepburn and Kurstjens, 1988).”

Well that doesn’t sound appetising (unless, again, you’re a small hive beetle). Some more interesting quotes about older studies:

“Furthermore, many previous studies indicated that the usage of old combs parallels the appearance of a variety of brood diseases; for instance chalkbrood (Koenig et al., 1986), American foulbrood (Gilliam, 1985) and nosema (Bailey and Ball, 1991) are more likely to occur in hives with old combs. Also older combs appear to contain more brood pheromones, which can prevent the queens from laying eggs because they regard that cells are already used (Free and Winder, 1983)”

This study was performed by the same Egyptian university as the previous one I mentioned (it seems most of the earlier brood age studies were performed in Europe or America in the 80s and the topic in those areas is now perhaps regarded as covered, whereas in the last few years a circle of researchers in the Middle East have been interested in it. I preferred to spend my time reading the recent studies and relying on their citations of the older ones). Some things not stated in the studies but that I happen to know from my own experience visiting apiaries in Egypt: the reason they rarely mention more than 7 frames, and they don’t distinguish between brood and nonbrood frames is because hives rarely get bigger than a 10 frame box there, even spinning honey out of brood frames.

In this study they ran 12 hives, within which each one had seven frames aged 0 through 7 years (ie each hive had a frame of each age). Thus they could study the bees emerging from each aged comb without it being affected by larger systemic effects of comb age in the colony. Emerging bees from specifically aged combs were collected, measured and dissected.

One square inch of comb was cut out and carefully weighed. In the less-than-a-year-old combs this weighed 1.69g, the weight steadily rising until the 7 year old comb weighs 8.51g per square inch, a five-fold increase in mass

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(which would all certainly be slum gum when melted down, hence the much greater ratio of slumgum to wax when you render old comb). Internal volume of cells is roughly halved from fresh comb to 7 year old comb, and inner cell diameter reduced from 6mm to 4.8. This obviously results in smaller bees.

Bees emerging from the first year comb weighed in at 122.89mg, bees emerging from 7 year old comb weighed an average of 68.06mg (Nearly half the size, only 55.38% as big!). The proboscus (tongue) was only 72% as big, which could severely limit the nectar available to them. Forewing 78% as big, no doubt limiting flight range or efficiency. Every limb and organ was, in short, much smaller.

Which brings us to the final of these recent studies, again by the same mob out of Kafrelsheikh University, Egypt.4 32 hives were divided into four equal groups and combs replaced with combs of 1, 2, 3, or 4 years of age, like the last mentioned study each hive was given an equal mix of ages, the order of the combs changed in the various groups to eliminate effects from being on the outside frame versus inside. At the beginning of the experiment all the queens were removed so as to cause emergency queen cells to be made. Unlike swarm cells, emergency queen cells are made from building out the queen cell around an existing egg so the size and qualities of the underlying cell structure will have a significant impact.

Most queen cells were constructed the second day after removal of the queens. Number of queen cells constructed directly corresponded with age of comb, averaging 15.55

From Shawer 2020.

on 1 year old comb, and in order of increasing age 9.75, 6.00, and finally 5.25. The percentage of queens successfully emerging also exactly corresponded to comb age at 93.25%, 92.31%, 79.17% and 61.90%. Queens from the young comb were fed two-and-a-half times more royal jelly and were 24% bigger then queens raised from the old comb (180mg vs 145mg). Numerous specific organs of the queens were studied and other than their diameter and hindwing size most of their organs were significantly smaller when raised on older comb. Significantly their ovarioles/ovaries and spermathecas were much smaller, which would reduce their fertility. In general a number of studies have shown a high degree of correlation between size of queens and their quality (Amiri et al., 2017; Delaney et al., 2011; Kahya et al., 2008; Taha, 2005, 2013). This last study is significant because it is a common practice if one finds a hive to be queenless in the apiary to just grab a comb with eggs from one’s best hive and put it in the queenless hive for them to make a queen from. As you can see from the above statistics though, unless you grab comb that you know to be young (some people mark the date of insertion on the topbar, otherwise you’ll have to depend on your ability to judge comb age),

(Shawer 2020)

odds are you’re about to requeen with an inferior queen from old comb! To avoid the risk of rearing an inferior emergency queen it is probably better to either buy a queen from a reputable breeder or at least graft an egg into an artificial queen cup.

Shawar et al note “Nevertheless, many beekeepers are reluctant to regularly replace old wax combs and believe that such a practice is not economical because a comb contains about 1200 g of wax, and because the energy or resources required to construct a comb can be tantamount to 7.5kg of honey (Seeley, 1985).” So what’s one to do?

All the above studies looked at brood comb, the reduction in quality in honey frames is probably marginal by comparison, so cycle out brood combs, but don’t stress so much about honey frames unless they are clearly getting old and dark (in which case one begins to worry about their attraction to pests and possible buildup of any pesticides that have been in the environment).

Here is what I’ve been doing ever since in Bundaberg I discovered how much small hive beetles love old comb, and it also doubles as a measure to discourage swarming. Every spring when I’m supering my hives I’ll remove the outer two frames from the brood box and put them in

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the middle of the super I’m adding. I push the remaining frames outward and insert two brand new foundation frames into the middle of the brood (or if I happen to have two fresh fresh only-seen-honey drawn combs I might insert them). This gap of two frames in the very middle of the brood makes the bees on either side think they don’t have enough population to swarm, but they’re not constrained because they have that space, and the two former-brood frames in the new super help encourage the bees to immediately start going up there. Usually the two outer frames were relatively full of pollen but this isn’t a problem, they seem to immediately relocate that pollen, it doesn’t result in pollen frames in my honey super next time I check anyway.

As a result of doing this at least once a year, in my eight frame brood boxes I always have, from one side to another, frames aged less than 4, 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3, 4. But that was before I read these studies, I might now do this more aggressively to ensure my brood frames are no older than 2 (probably by repeating the process mid season).

There are of course all kinds of ways to do beekeeping, and many would baulk at the above method due to a widely-held almost religious belief in “never splitting the brood nest.” From years of experience though this method works great and plain common sense would indicate that in a full box of bees in Spring, a gap of two frames of

Diagram of described frame cycling procedure by Kris Fricke

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(Taha 2021).

brood isn’t going to collapse their temperature control. There are more complicated frame replacement strategies however which carefully avoid making any such gap..

But either way one will need to deal with frames of old comb. One can cut across all four sides to remove all the comb, though then you’ll have to rewire it as well. A heat gun can more or less cause the wax to all but fall out. Either way you’ll probably have to spend time carefully scraping wax out of the groove in the topbar. It’s altogether a bit tedious.

I have a way of avoiding this tedium you may find scandalous. The natural cycle is that hives in the wild rarely survive more than six years before failing; then wax moths come in and convert all the comb to their sticky fluffof webbing; and then mice use it for a nest, and then the space is left vacant and empty for bees to move in and restart the cycle. I like working with natural cycles.

And so I intentionally, yes intentionally, go through my frames in storage just often enough (about once a month here in the south) that ideally several square inches worth of the centre of the old dark comb has been converted into the devil’s fairy-floss by plump wax moth larvae, who will be cheerfully squirming in the vicinity.

To curb their enthusiasm pluck them out and rain them down upon your chooks, to whom nothing is more delicious. Toss the webbing in the bushes, it will disappear,

elves I assume. Repeat this process until the entire core of the comb has been removed by the wax moth larvae but the outer edges all remain (generally they conveniently do it this way). Don’t just leave them for a long time though or they’ll thoroughly turn all the comb to webbing, damage the frames with their cocoons (which always bore half into

1. Taha, E.-K. A., & Al-Kahtani, S. N. (2020). The relationship between comb age and performance of honey bee colonies. Saudi Journal of Biological Sciences, 27(1), 30–34. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.sjbs.2019.04.005 2. Taha, E.-K. A., Rakha, O. M., Elnabawy, S. M., Hassan, M. M., & Shawer, D. M. B. (2021). Combage significantly influences the productivity of the honey bee (Apis mellifera) colony. Journal of King Saud University - Science, 33(4), 101436. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jksus.2021.101436 3. Shawer, M. B., Elnabawy, E. M., Mousa, K. M., Gaber, S., & Ueno, T. (2020). Impact of different comb age on morphological and biological characteristics of honey bee workers (Apis mellifera L.Journal of the Faculty of Agriculture, Kyushu University, 65(2), 277–282.) https:// doi.org/10.5109/4103891 4. Taha, E.-K.A. et al. (2024) ‘Comb age significantly influences the emergency queen rearing, morphometric and reproductive characteristics of the Queens’, Journal of Apicultural Research, pp.1–8. doi:10.1080/0021883 9.2024.2336376. “Calico” comb partially deconstructed by wax moths and

rebuilt by bees

wood) and will have had enough completing the pupation cycle to potentially be a nuisance to others. Done right though, the resultant comb will have swirls of dark chocolate brown whirled with the golden french vanilla coloured brand new comb like an ice cream of buzzing bees, or, perhaps, like a purring calico cat.

References

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