Drawing comb

Honey Bees make wax.  Honey Bees draw combs.

Honey bees go out in the Spring to locate nectar which they bring back and make wax from to draw out combs.

There is a grave concern among some beekeepers that the flowers and plants that bees are foraging from more and more frequently contain some type of pesticide that the bees will bring back and become a part of the wax combs that they will lay eggs in and store forage resources in.

Scientific research recently has shown that wax combs do indeed contain a great variety of toxins from pesticides from both outside the hive and introduced directly into the hive by beekeepers as treatments.

Can beeswax truly be "clean" anymore with all the pesticides being used so widely?  Can beekeepers do anything to help bees produce clean wax?

There is a thought that by providing sugar syrup from the very beginning of placing new bees in a bee nest the bees will draw the new wax from the sugar syrup and be clean giving the bees a clean start in terms of raising brood in a clean environment.

Having said that, the bees will eventually stop taking the sugar syrup in favor of real nectar and any consequent wax drawn from that nectar will be suspect in regards to containing toxins.

In talking about pesticides, we refer to a lethal dose in terms of application dosage.  How much of a toxin has to be present, how much must a creature be exposed to, before it has a detrimental affect on them?

Beeswax absorbs things easily.  The absorption rate can increase levels of toxins held within it fairly rapidly.  The more often that bees can reduce the presence of accumulating toxins or minimize the rate of absorption, the better off they will be, the healthier the colony will be, the more able their collective immune system as a super organism will be to resist illness and disease.

The practice of removing wax combs on a regular basis by Emile Warre and others so that bees will build fresh, new, clean wax has many merits.  However, to beekeepers whose primary concern is high honey production, it is anathema.  The more they can re-use drawn wax combs, the less resources bees use on producing wax and instead concentrate on making more honey instead.

To a honey producer beekeeper, fully drawn wax combs are just valuable as the honey itself.  The notion of deliberately removing those combs from the hive is repugnant and even considered folly to them.

Manufactured wax foundation has come under suspicion in recent years because of the possibility of spreading toxins commercially thus possibly contributing to the rapid build up of toxins in hives from the start.

It's not a simple problem and there is no simple solution or answer.  Lots of people want to assign a label of "Right" or "Wrong", "Good" and "Bad" and it's not that easy to say something like that.  The more important thing is to find solutions that help bees to bee healthy.

Personally, I don't think it's possible at this point in the game to eliminate toxins in beeswax over the course of a season.  I think the best effort we can make is to minimize the accumulation of toxins from one season to the next.

For me, I plan to keep harvesting the wax along with the honey at the end of each season and cycling through old wax every other season.