- Okay, so now we're inside our shed, our storage shed and we're ready to scrape the
boxes and start the vote to decide which ones we're gonna keep to reuse for making up splits
or to put it in the colonies for taking splits out of. Or for anything we can use this comb
for if it's in good shape. We'll also inspect it for American foulbrood so we make sure
we're not reusing comb that's infected with American foulbrood. So take the box off the
wheelbarrow and we put it on to our scraping box. So, just set it over here. Put that on
the scraping box. Then we scrape all the wax off the top and all the wax off the bottom
of the frame. The scraping box catches the majority of the wax and again, we don't want
this wax getting spread around the bee yard for bio security reasons. But it also gums
up your boots so you don't wanna be walking around like that. Then we scrape the bottom
boards. It's easy to scrape the tops and the bottoms while they're still in the box 'cause
the box is helping to hold on to them. Then what we do is we take the frame out. There's
a plastic frame. They don't tend to have a lot of wax on to these plastic frames. I'll
just knock that off there. So just hold it securely, knock it off. Then that, anything
we scraped goes in to an already scraped box. We'll talk about scraping the boxes in a minute.
Here you can see a comb. We're not gonna waste time scraping things until we've decided whether
we're keeping them or not. See that's a broken layer ... a bunch of old combs, it's not really
usable down in here... a wire broken loose there. So this one is going to be burned.
That one is also going to be burned. It's a very old frame, quite black looking. We
don't render that dark burr comb. The pupa casing soak up wax and it's really difficult
to get the wax out of them. It's a messy job, it takes very specialized equipment, a steam
generator, a wax press. We just burn those instead of going through that process. Of
course, we don't burn anything that has plastic, any plastic foundation. That has to go into
the dumpster or after the dump ... Because we can't burn plastic, it creates some very
serious toxins in the environment if we do. There's a good frame, that's drawn combs and
we're gonna be able to reuse that. There's no excess wax on the outside. So it goes in
there. These plastic frames, there's not a lot to scrape, only the tops and the bottoms.
That's kinda debatable but it is getting pretty old too. Another old comb. So we're being
pretty ruthless here. That frame might be, maybe eight-ten years old. I'm gonna keep
that one. So we're gonna scrape these shoulders off right here. And we'll scrape a little
bit across the bottom. I'll show you what that looks like in a second. Either in your
hive tool, sometimes scraping works better with the heel of the hive tool. Sometimes
with the blade of the hive tool. So down there... There's a frame that's ready to go. That's
got all this drawn comb in there, that's really valuable resource for the bees to have comb
that's already built and ready to go. This one, on the other hand, never did get drawn
out last year. You can see they're just starting to build comb on that. But there's not much
there, I'll clean out those little bits there. Not much to clean up there, fairly new frame.
If we want to redo comb on a plastic frame, we can just scrape the comb right off and
put it back into the hive and let them build comb on that again. Kind of a tough job, you
need to really work at it to get that scraped off. But that is a doable situation. Now,
we're going to scrape the box. You can see there's all this wax in here, propolis all
around here, propolis all down through there. We wanna clean all that up. So we'll just
scrape away. You don't wanna have too sharp a hive tool for any kind of scraping on wood.
So when you get a new hive tool, what I like to do is run a file across it, along here,
to flatten that edge. And that scrapes well without digging into the wood. So we'll scrape
along this area here, grated there, We will scrape along there. And then all down the
sides and then around on the top. A bit of a workout. This works better in cold weather,
when the wax is more brittle. The fact is that we got pretty warm days here so I'm working
away at it. Now you can see, all the frames will move around nicely in there. There is
still lots of excess wax here causing friction when the bees ... when we're moving frames
around. That's clean and ready to go to put more frames into it. We got a really, yucky
looking bottom board here. Bees died over the winter here, they dropped them at the
bottom. There weren't enough bees left to clean that up. And so they just died and molded
in there. So you can see, several different kinds of mold. A white one there, a green
one there. All these bee carcasses, all the little bumbs of wax that the bees use as ladder
to climb up to there frames. And a nice big chunk of propolis in there. We're gonna keep
that propolis. So what we're gonna do is use a wide scraper, there's a wide scraper there.
And we'll scrape everything but that propolis to begin with. A scraping box like this is
really nice to have but any kind of a table ... works fine. But you need to have something
to jam things up against so that you can scrape very well and hold on to. So there's a nice
chunk of propolis there. We'll clean that up a little bit more and then I can scrape
that propolis up. You see, how I'm holding my hand there above it. So we don't lose any
of it. There's some ... There's some more. Pretty sticky. And the rest that's kinda dirty.
So we got a nice little lump of solid propolis there that we can use. So the bottom board
is ready to use, again. The boxes are ready, the frames are ready to use again. And, that's
how we handle things in the spring. One thing I wan to cover a little bit here is, as we're
going along, we check to see if there's any foulbrood in the cells. If they ... have had
foulbrood, if we hold the frame at an angle like that, we have sunlight shinning down
or a really good strong light shinning down, we're looking to see foulbrood scales, along
the bottom of the cell like that and they'll be black so they blend in with this black
wax. But you can see a difference in the texture on the cells. So we inspect every burred frame
to see if there is any American foulbrood in there before we reuse it. It rarely shows
up. We do use antibiotic here, in Ontario to help prevent American foulbrood spread
in the spring and fall when bees are rubbing. But we still need to be extra cautious and
that's not ... those materials aren't available for use in a lot of jurisdictions. So this
inspection becomes even more important in those places. But that's all basically and
ready to go ... to make a nice home for a nucleus colony or a split. Thanks very much
for watching, see you next time.