MBC, here is a picture of a frame on the right with the contaminated wax.
http://www.immenfreunde.de/pics2/wachs/Netherlands.jpg
There was a decent amount of discussion about this on Beesource. Several of the German speaking members contributed first hand experiences.
http://adara.adafrance.org/infos/Qlte_cire.php
Interesting pics.....but....
Cutting wax with paraffin wax for foundation making long predates the current ongoing wax shortage.
Several years ago I was at a foundation plant in Spain....actually it took in peoples old combs as is, cleaned them all out through a boiling bath, sterilised the frames, recovered all the wax, and paid the beekeepers accordingly and then they got their own frames back (they were all branded with the beekeepers reg number). They had at least 100 tonnes of wax in stock, all graded by colour and whether it was derived from old combs or cappings. You could choose the wax your foundation would be made from.
They were able to do 6 tonnes of foundation per day.
They were on the point of completing a foundation order then that was price sensitive and the client had chosen the cheaper darker wax from old combs and it was being cut with paraffin wax too....astonishingly the end product was 70% paraffin wax. They were on the last pallet when I saw it, and there were already 27 pallets ready....so it was a LOT of foundation.
This was the clients specification, and later I met the client and he insisted this made no difference at all to how well the bees did on the foundation. The destination was outside Europe. The foundation looked normal, smelled normal and I doubt many could have picked the difference.
However,,,,the pics in the links are interesting and definitely merit further investigation and my main suspicion would fall on varroacide impregnation of the wax. This is given the other information provided. But the Netherlands comb looks odd. From their format it looks as if they may have come from the same hive but do look incredibly different,
Most of the vacant cells in the centre of the comb are brown (in the other link they are not so that one for sure looks like the brood failed to come to anything, reason not certain) so they have had brood in the dark cells that has, a least once, gone full cycle, Did it hatch normally or die in the pupal stage? Don't know. But...and its a BIG 'but' given the picture is of inadequate scale and sharpness to know.............a significant number of the cells are very much darker than the medium brown ones around them. This would ring all kinds of alarm bells at first glance and I would immediately be looking at that comb to see if those dark cells were due to scale being present. As I say, not a good enough picture to know, but it would be the first thing I looked for before other bogeymen were given priority.
Slightly reminiscent of the time neonics were flavour of the day...all sorts were blamed on them....and quite few 'proof' pics and videos did the rounds....but if you looked closely you could see failing queen evidence, drone layers, and deformed wings.
As for Chinese wax? Well any responsible foundation maker will need to see a detailed analysis of the lot they are buying. There has been some very contaminated wax from there in the past, especially if it has been milled into foundation at source, but most is just fine. The main reason I don't like it is that it is soft and deforms more easily than wax from several other provenances.
Going back to the picture where the spotty brood was among virgin coloured cells........we used to see that quite often on new wax but not for some years now. We have rationalised what WE were seeing in a rather different way, to do with breeding and chalk brood resistance, and possibly the detergent used on the rollers to make the foundation release. We often got some really rubbish first brood in a comb. Since then we have improved our breeding methods, never taking queens from colonies that show a significant amount of chalk, and use different makers to produce our wax. Now we rarely see this.
We are not so arrogant to believe that our wax stock is any better than anyone else's for residues from varroa treatments, and it will have amounts of all the common varroacides some from many years back, and we have imported foundation from USA, New Zealand, France and Spain before, and even Chinese wax derived but UK milled foundation some 30 years ago. Tiny proportions of all of these will be lurking in the wax blocks we have sitting ready to go for milling today, and all the oil miscible varroa treatments get into the wax and stay there almost forever.
All would merit some detailed investigation...generated from a neutral standpoint. The Netherlands comb is indeed a weird one.
