From: "Dave Cushman" <dave.cushman@lineone.net>
Date: Thu, 8 Mar 2001 11:49:40 -0000
To: <BiologicalBeekeeping@yahoogroups.com>
Subject: Re: Clean wax for Organic Production?

Hi Dee

> So you are reinforcing then, the statement above,"that thinner is better",
> to give the bees a greater chance to add new fresh clean wax to dilute the
> base of the foundation.

Yes... but this dilution of the original wax turns out to be not as much as
you (or I) was expecting.

I read your original 90% ratio to mean 9 parts fresh wax to 1 part
contaminated. My 4:1 ratio (which was a guess) meant 4 parts fresh wax to 1 part
contaminated.

> Or thin foundation sheets with no cell calls? John Sewell was mentioning to
> me 9 sheets or so to the pound. What ratio of new wax would that be Dave?

If John was talking about BS sized sheets then 9 sheets to the lb is 50 .5
grams per sheet (the same as our norm). None (or very little) fresh wax
would be added.

If John is talking about Langstroth size which is 30 % larger area, the
sheets would be thinner giving a ratio of 10 parts contaminated wax to 3
parts fresh so the dilution ratio would be 1:3.3 using the same criteria that
we used above this gives twelve times less than my best guess and 81 times
less than the 90 % we first started talking about. This make whole sheets
rather unnattractive frome the purification point of view.

The dilution is in the right direction (so it is "better") but if whole
sheets of foundation are used I doubt if you would ever top 1:4 as the
actual ratio which is sixteen times smaller than my original guess.

> Originally it was to produce whole sheets of workerbees too, for honey
> production, and limit drone production,and then we found out the rest also.
> No?

Whilst limiting drone production may well have been one of the aims of the
originators of foundation. I believe that the bees know more about how many
drones is good for them than beekeepers do. There are several subtle things
that drones do apart from fertilisation of queens...The bees know this but
it seems few beekeepers do!

> Now how do we standardise telling others how to photodegradate comb treated
> with fluvalinate?
> Wax in cakes too? Solar wax melters won't work. The glass blocks the UV
> light needed to photodegradate the wax. Comments Dave?

Now this is a new ballgame!
First we need to establish what frequency of light will perform the degradeation.
But even when we know this (assuming there IS positive photodegradation of
the fluvalinate) there are problems delivering the UV light. The light
itself will not penetrate wax more than a few wavelengths (something less
than a millionth of a millimetre).

We could use a very thin film of solid wax (of the order of 0.10 mm) which
would be difficult to make and handle.

Molten wax would seem to be easier to handle.
If the wax was passed between plates of glass that would transmit the light
and the gap between the plates was small (0.10 mm [0.004"]) large arrays of
lights could be shone onto both sides of this sandwich. The whole assembly
would be heated and thermostatically controlled. Although the irradiation
would only cause degradation on the surface of this molten film, the surface
would be continuously changing ( turbulance & brownian motion) as the molten
wax passed through the narrow gap.

Before you could use a system like this you would have to filter out all
particulate matter from the wax and refine it to the stage that it was most
able to transmit the UV light.

We then have the problem of having to remove whatever the UV light breaks
down the fluvalinate into... and what about flumethrin, amitraz, coumophos
and other items, are these also susceptible to UV light or do we have to
find systems to deal with these products individually?

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