From: "Dave Cushman" <dave.cushman@lineone.net>
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2001 09:14:10 -0000
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: Clean wax for Organic Production?

Hi Dee

----- Original Message -----
From: deelusbybeekeeper <deelusbybeekeeper@excelonline.com>

> To
> which I would say, the blame is not all S. Africa. Allied forces used DDT
> extensively during WWII throughout Europe, UK, and USA and after, crops in
> all countries were heavily sprayed with it for years past the 1960s.

> I think the main emphasis rather than finger pointing here, is to find
> sources for beeswax, with as little toxic residues as possible, or teach
> beekeepers how to lower them in the wax & products they have

I was not trying to blame anyone... The real point is that remoteness does
not mean chemical free.

> Are there controls in place for
> one on one procesing of ones wax to get what you gave for working rates
> back, without the wax being substituted for something else?

You can do this in UK but you need to talk with the individual foundation
manufacturers about batch size as each has different sized melters and any
quantity must therefore be an integer number of this melter
capacity.(smallest) I know is 225 lb.

> Another reason
> to self-contain and learn to make one's own? Beekeepers make everything
> else, right? Why have they never been taught how to make the other half -
> namely the foundation their bees use?

I do not know what the percentage is but some (I guess 5%- 10%) in UK do
make their own.

> Here for making foundation, I would say, thinner is better to give the bees
> a greater chance to add new fresh clean wax to dilute the base by 90% each
> time

One of the reasons foundation is the guage and weight it is, is to provide
all the wax needed to make the comb. A freshly made BS standard brood comb
weighs 51 grams...A sheet of BS brood sized foundation weighs 51 grams. The
bees rework the wax that the foundation is made from, very little is added
by bees at the initial stage. The additions come as the comb gets older so
that when you melt old comb you get more wax than the original weight of
foundation.

You could make the foundation thinner...Dee does and she also eliminates
sidewalls so that the weight of her foundation sheets would be less than the
finished comb... Thus the bees would have to produce wax to add to finish
the comb. I would doubt that the foundation could be made thin enough to
achieve a 9:1 gain in fresh wax (4:1 would be my guess).

The only way to get a high percentage of freshly produced wax into comb is
to use minimum sized starter strips.

The building of comb from starters takes longer and consumes honey. One of
the main reasons we use foundation at all is to speed up comb drawing and
reduce honey consumption by bees so that it is available for the beekeeper
to harvest.

By keeping your own wax seperate from contaminated wax and using starter
strips you will gradually dilute the chemical residues that were in the wax
that you started with.

This may not be a perfect situation but it is about as good as we are going
to get.

Regards From:- Dave Cushman, G8MZY
Beekeeping and Bee Breeding, website
http://website.lineone.net/~dave.cushman