Cleaning old hives

We were kindly given an unused hive recently, which will be very useful as a spare when the new beekeeping season starts in April. (Why? Check out this post about “hive splits”: https://cpbees.blogspot.com/2019/04/hive-splits_26.html)

To reduce this risk of passing a disease to our bees, the hive boxes needed to be cleaned thoroughly. This process involves scraping all the wax and propolis (“bee glue”) from the hives boxes, and then scorching the insides with a blowtorch. This should kill any pathogens and allow our bees to live in the boxes safely.

Here are a few photos of the process. We plan to give them a lick of paint too, to make them match the rest of the hives in our apiary.