i have one black plastic deep frame in one of my hives, it has chocolate brown wax which i thought was just because it is an old frame, but every two weeks i scrape large pieces of burr comb off this frame and it is always that same color. is this typical of those black frames? the rest of the hives gets yellow wax.
Brown wax usually comes with foot traffic of bees. This frame may be one they cross frequently when moving through the hive.
Put out a door mat and tell them to wipe their feet before entering! ;)
Sometimes they when they create combs, if they are in a hurry or before the "white-wax" stage, it appears that they will re-use old wax. This will be brownish.
That's what I see in my hives.
Rick
the foot traffic theory, im not buying it. it appears way to quickly and none of the other frames have even a slight browness to the wax. my guess would be they are either reusing or they are simply building to match the existing wax on that particular frame. maybe, who knows.
Quote from: newguy on April 23, 2007, 01:02:45 PM
the foot traffic theory, im not buying it. it appears way to quickly and none of the other frames have even a slight browness to the wax. my guess would be they are either reusing or they are simply building to match the existing wax on that particular frame. maybe, who knows.
I don't think they are trying to color cordinate the wax building process. :-D Seriously they are probaly reusing the older wax. Keep in mind that every brood cycle and the more foot traffic across the comb the darker it is and the smaller the cell size.
i agree they probably are reusing old wax, however they are only putting it on the black plastic frame. none of the others have any of this color wax. i just thought it was interesting that it appears they are in fact "color coordinating".
Try some different colored frames or buy some decorative colored wax foundation from Mann Lake and see if they'll build you a rainbow.
Do you all notice that these brown wax are mostly in small size, normally about 1-2 fingers size. And it would just stop there. So my hypotesis is bees build brown wax when food (syrup or nectar) is insufficient for them to produce large area white wax, so they use own resources (unknown to me) to build, but due to limited resources they have, the brown wax just remain small.