A beekeeper shows how to scrape burr comb off frames using a hive tool and smoker, keeping the 8 mm bee space that prevents unwanted building. Collected comb goes into a wax bucket for rendering into beeswax for balms, not the trash.
Today I'm gonna show you how to remove burr comb to keep the top of your frames nice and clean. So this colony here has got quite a lot of burr comb on the top of the frames, and in order to keep things tidy, in order to keep the bees and the queen safe, best thing you can do is tidy it all up, keep the bee space correct, and then you shouldn't have any issues like this in the future. So the reason that you might see burr comb on top of frames like this if you're buying a nuc is because of the additional bee space that's introduced above it with the ventilation screen. Within a beehive, the bottom of the frame that lives above this is exactly 8 millimeters, which is a single bee space. And the whole beehive spacing is designed around this premise, which is if you give the bees loads of unlimited space like this, they just build their own comb. But if you keep all of the gaps at 8 millimeters, then the bees will respect the space. Once you get them out of this nuc with the wrong space into your beehive, everything is fine. But before you do that, you must remove the burr comb. Now, Now I gave this tip in another video as well, which is if you open your nuc for the first time, don't go straight in for the burr comb. Get it transferred over to the beehive first, because as soon as you start puffing the smoke, it's going to make it more difficult to find the queen. I've already found the queen in this one. I know she's there. They're going to stay in this one for a week or two, and I'm going to show you how to get it cleaned up now. So before I get in here and smoke them and remove the burr comb, all I'm going to do is show you what I've got here, which is my wax bucket. So whenever I'm doing any inspections or doing any sort of wax processing with nice clean wax like this, and burr comb is incredibly clean in most instances, You don't just want to chuck it away or chuck it on the floor because this burr comb here is a disease risk, but it's also a huge benefit for you because you can melt it down and make beeswax and make balms and do all cool things at the end of the season. So don't chuck it away, get yourself a beeswax bucket and render it all down come the end of the year. So all we're going to do is we're going to take our hive tool, get it nice and flat to the frame like that, and work our way along trying to get as much wax as we possibly can without killing or squishing any bees. Now you can imagine if I just went in and tried to start doing that now, I'm going to kill and squish a lot of bees. So the smoker comes into play here. See all of the bees, Zane, on the top bars? If I just give them a really good puff of smoke like that, vast majority have gone down. I see people going wild and just putting way too much smoke into their smokers, but like 1 second's worth of smoke has done the job there. Then really simple, I just come in, scrape all the way along like that, taking my time. You can see, quite straightforward. Sometimes you just have to nudge the bees out of the way. Believe it or not, you can do it without damaging any of the bees. Take your time. There we go. So I just want to show you the angle that you should be using here and the way that you should be using your hive tool. You can either come at it as flat as possible with the hive tool that way. I quite like that way, and if you're confident with the sharpness of a hive tool, it works quite well. But the much more traditional way is to come in and you'll be able to see that there is an angle, there is a chamfer on there. So I'm not coming flat, I'm just going to the chamfer and then you'll see it slides across really nicely if you do it like that. Probably that's the angle that you want there, maybe a 10-15 degree angle. And then the final one here. So there we go, all of these frames here are nicely cleaned. If you just go up to the top zone and give me a real top-down view, I just want to show you the bits that you need to avoid and the bits that you don't want to scrape back. So you can see all of my top bars are now completely clean, but you can see in the middle we've still got a little bit of brace comb and we've still got a bit over there where they built it out. Don't bother trying to go in and clean it up with the frames in situ because all that's going to happen is it's going to drop down and just make things messy. If you really want to clear that frame, take it out very slowly. I'm pretty sure that's the one that's got the queen on. If you do want to clean those frames, you need to take them out individually and go up like that with the hive tool. Takes a little bit longer, but it's worthwhile doing once, keeping the framing correct, and then it shouldn't happen again in the future. So there we go, the frames are completely clean. It's amazing the amount of wax that you get off just a small colony like that. And then I'll chuck all of that in the mix for rendering down at the end of the year. Now, if you want to learn more about beekeeping, we have an online course called 14-Day Beekeeper that turns you from a beginner to a competent beekeeper in just 2 weeks.
