This beautiful box of honeycomb is ‘welded’ to the box below…to move it, I’ve got to cut the bottom of the comb. I’d like to do it without damaging it or killing bees.
I only wanted to switch the third box (full of honeycomb) with the top box which was empty. The box of honeycomb was blocking the empty, so it made sense to swap…but the honeycomb was attached to the bars in the box below. If I just pried the box up, I might tear the combs apart leading to a real mess. I consulted the forums…Bernhard suggests cracking the boxes a bit then taking a thin wire to slice through the bottoms of the combs to lift the box out.
I wound a short length of stainless steel wire around some cut broomstick ends. I’ll see-saw it back and forth to carefully cut through comb.
After reading some of the experiences of beekeepers tearing apart combs I knew I wanted to avoid that. The whole thing actually took less time than I thought…about 5 minutes. It came apart with the minimum of damage.
I shot this video (sped up in parts to avoid the ‘yawn’ effect)
Adventures in Natural Beekeeping 