I have once only spun honey from comb previously containing brood! Quite frankly it was rubbish !
I didn't consider it worth feeding back to the bees!
My experience I must stress!! Could have been bad luck .
I take the point that super comb is subject to repeated use but as brood is never raised in there (no cocoon debris) the cell remain in good uncontaminated condition .
WW
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I had a super with lots of pollen in it last year and spun it out
Being rape it went solid before I strained it
There wasn't loads but I am using it on the two little colonies I have
Just wamed up then made into a patty
Because there is everything they might need in there I hope it will be better than fondant for them
I read somewhere that bees remove the cocoon and clean the cells before storing honey. Is this correct?
I'm not sure that they remove the cocoon, but they certainly give the cell a thorough clean out.Honey is antibacterian and antiinflammatary. It can be used on cuts whilst they heal. Can't imagine it being contaminated. And even if the bees didn't clean all the bits out of the cells, they are easily filtered out.I've never experienced it tasting *rubbish*. Quite the opposite, so I think WW was just unlucky.
If the objection is psychological, how do people deal with the idea of earthworms in their minced steaks?Or...
The brown crumbs you see on a floor insert are the remnants of the cocoon I believe. There was a discussion on the topic of ever-thickening brood comb on the Irish list some years ago, and dear old Dave Cushman was prompted to write this topic in his web site along with this picture from Penn State University:
http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/smalboldcomb.html
The bees seem to keep paring down the sides of the comb but are much less driven to treat the base of the cells in the same way. You end up with that laminated effect at the bottom of the cell but much less build-up on the sides.
There was also a picture posted somewhere at around that time of cut old brood cells that had been used to store honey. You could see the dark wisps leaching out into the honey. The dark stuff would be the gunk that gets incorporated into the walls of old comb - all the stuff from dirty footprints and leaky bums inside the cell. It converted me to not using brood comb for honey production.
Last edited by gavin; 27-03-2013 at 08:47 PM.
Thanks. Many people don't use excluders, i'm thinking about trying this season without them myself. If you don't extract from brood frames, would you end up having to replace super frames more often as the queen lays in them?
Those who go without queen excluders - like Murray, the local bee farmer at least in the later part of the season - tend to use a one size fits all approach. Brood boxes as supers. That simplifies the shuffling back down into one box.
I've occasionally used a 'brood and a half' and ended up with bees in places I'd rather they weren't.
If you let them have a free run into super frames as well as the usual deeper brood frames then the super frames would have the same sort of life as the brood box frames I'd have thought.
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