Storing Equipment and Drawn Frames Over Winter
With all the talk about overwintering our bees, have you thought about overwintering drawn comb frames and equipment? Whether it’s hive boxes, honey supers, or frames from a dead hive or surplus drawn comb from combining hives, storing them for future use effectively and efficiently can be a challenge depending on how many you have.
Storing Equipment
Odds are you are storing frames with their respective hive boxes, but what if you aren’t and you have multiple used boxes laying around empty? This is a fairly easy problem to resolve if you have the space. Both deep and medium hive bodies will stack inside of each other. Make a stack of two boxes, then place one deep or two mediums on their sides inside those boxes. Keep going up as high as you are comfortable making it. Here are some additional tips that can help preserve them for next spring:
- Store off the ground: Ground contact will rot boxes. If storing outside (which is fine), put timbers or concrete blocks on the ground and build your stack from there.
- Allow for moisture drainage: If stored outside, these boxes will be subject to the elements, which can age them prematurely. Make sure your boxes are not stacked where water can accumulate in them and certainly not on a surface that traps moisture.
- Try to keep them clean: Bees will no doubt live in a box that is somewhat dirty, but why subject them to it if it’s not necessary? Clean hive = happy bees!
- Maintain airflow: Keeping stacked hive boxes under a covered area is best, but still stack them on top of a support object such as bricks or timbers to allow for airflow.
You can successfully store drawn comb to preserve them for next year in several ways.
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Certan B402 is a biological larvicide that will protect your drawn comb from wax moths. Certan has a bacterium that is lethal to moths and butterflies but has no effect on bees or humans. Using a hand sprayer to distribute the 19-to-1 dilution will protect your frames over the fall and winter. Because the bacteria will kill wax moth larvae, you do not need to wrap them, nor do you have to repeat the process before putting them back in service.
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Para-Moth can be used in a couple of different ways. Wrap your supers in a trash bag or tote box, place Para-Moth on the top box, and close the bag or tote tightly. To create a box tower, stack all your supers on top of each other on a flat surface or inverted hive cover. In between every two or three
supers, place a small amount of Para-Moth (in a sock, on a paper plate, on piece of paper, etc.) as well as on the top box under the cover. You will want to make sure you reapply Para-Moth once it dissolves (a month or two) to keep wax moths out. (Do not use moth balls because they will penetrate the wax and leech into the stored honey the following season. Only use Para-
Moth.) When using Para-Moth, plan to air the frames out prior to installing them into a hive.
- Freezer: If you have plenty of freezer space for all of your frames of drawn-out comb, freezing is a great way to protect them from wax moth damage. Frames can stay frozen indefinitely. Take them out to thaw prior to putting them in a hive with bees.
By: Paul Fagala