After a dead out what to do with good honey frames?
Which will be around a year after the honey was stored. My concern is that the honey may crystallize if you leave it stored for that long. Most honey, except for the very high fructose ones like acacia, crystallize within a year. Bees will eat anything based on nectar/sucrose, but they prefer liquid honey to crystallized in my hives, at least. So I would want to use it sooner rather than later. I would be interested to hear what others think.
Yes, but I would say when all of the boxes you intend to have for winter are 80% full. That may be one, two or 3 deeps, depending on your climate. For your climate, I would say at least 2 deeps, but I think Ed (@Anon) would prefer 3 deeps
I would never feed with a harvesting super on top.
I wouldn’t do that, for the reasons I gave above, so I have no advice on that concept or on your question number 4), sorry.
If I had 14 frames of capped honey I would uncap and extract and use the wet frames to give back to the bees as needed. They will refill those lickity split with fresh honey for winter stores.
Don’t feed sugar with a honey super on the hive.
@Cowgirl, you make me laugh! I get the impression of a kid asking a question of a parent, not liking the answer, so asking the same thing in a different way or asking the other parent. If you have decided what you want to do, go ahead and do it.
The year to crystallize is not a magic number. I don’t know what your bees foraged. Their honey may crystallize in a month or two, or it may never fully crystallize.
However, if you have ever extracted traditional frames, you will know how hard it is to get crystallized honey out of comb. I imagine it is hard for the bees too. However, if they choose not to eat that honey next winter, you will have a devil of a job deciding what to do with the solid frames.
That is not quite the way I would put it.
All frames have mostly fully drawn comb, and
The drawn comb is 80% full of brood, honey or pollen, and
Every frame is completely covered with bees.
That way you have enough bees with motivation to work and defend the new space you are giving them.
I wish you all the best with finding the answers you really want!
I think any honey you harvest and eat unfiltered is going to have “stuff” in it. All of my honey gets coarse filtered.