What do you do with old used foundation and has this changed over the years?
I am about to clean up some frames removed from the hive. Some of the drawn foundation is quite nice and yellow some rather dark. Is it worth doing anything with this? Either to swap or possibly make into candles?
Advice gladly accepted from more experienced beeks. I did search the logs but didn't seem to find anything relevant but also I am interested in whether the problems with diseases have made people more cautious.
OK, the search would have been more productive if you had the correct name for what you were asking about.
"Foundation" is a clean sheet of precisely indented wax, used as the ... errr ... foundation for building comb upon.
"Old foundation" would have turned up info about old dry sheets of wax, either stored too long or inappropriately, and probably lots of helpful info about refreshing it with a hairdryer (and Finman's scorn for the very idea).
However, your question seems instead to be about
old drawn comb. Not old
foundation!
Houses have foundations, but once the house is built on top, you don't refer to the whole structure as 'foundation' - because people will misunderstand you. Same goes for comb built on foundation.
Old brood comb should be changed on an approximately 3 year cycle, to prevent disease build-up in the hive. Whether it is renewed by a "rolling replacement programme" or all at once (by either Bailey change or shook swarm) is really a matter of personal preference.
Old brood combs, withdrawn from use as above, could be melted down for their wax (potentially in a solar wax extractor), and the frames sanitised before reuse (by soda boiling or scorching). Or they could be burned entire, or after extracting the wax.
The wax has multiple potential uses, including being made into candles, polishes and new foundation sheets (possibly after trade-in).
I suspect most beekeepers would not worry over much about the quality of what they traded-in --- not least as the trade-in price doesn't seem to depend on quality or colour.
My personal concern about such wax reuse isn't about colour or disease as such, but rather about chemical residues in the wax - especially from anti-varroa pesticides like pyretheroids and (potentially) coumaphos - which are essentially invisible, and which I'd prefer NOT to be buying with my new foundation.
Some people would try and hang onto well-drawn
crop super (honey)
comb for as long as possible. It shouldn't have the same disease and debris build-up as brood comb.
They love a dark cavern filled with old brood frames.
