The books / Wax and the Solar Melter / chapter 13 of 14
Drawing comb costs stores
All chapters
- Seven kilos of honey for one of wax
- Why drawn comb is never thrown away
- Cappings, the clean wax
- Old brood comb
- A kilo a year
- Never direct heat
- The double boiler
- The solar melter
- The steam melter
- Filtering and grades
- Rotating the brood comb
- What wax is worth
- Drawing comb costs stores
- What a kilo can become
Every new frame of foundation you give a colony is an invoice, not a gift: at roughly seven kilograms of honey per kilogram of wax, drawing out a fresh box of comb is one of the most expensive things a colony does all year, paid for entirely out of stores it could otherwise be putting toward winter or your harvest.
That is the case for supering ahead of need, giving the bees room just before they would otherwise feel crowded, so the comb gets drawn while a flow is actually paying for it. It is also the case against supering months ahead of need: comb drawn too early, with no flow to fund it, is drawn slowly if at all, and the box just sits there taking up space the colony cannot yet use.