What is best way to feed honey too high in moisture back to your hive

I am a new beekeeper from Alberta. Canada. We extracted honey from hive two weeks ago and had a nice production of 15 quarts. 2 weeks later Peeked through end door and
Could see the frames were capped and pulled a few to get a better look and they were completely capped with wax. Set up to extract honey and only had about one cup each. Very disappointed so after draining all the frames I removed them and
With my capping removal tool I scraped a quite thick layer of wax off and returned them to the hive. There was no way to know how much honey was in the flow frames unless maybe weigh them. I don’t have a moisture meter but the honey flowed like water so I think it is too high in moiture so I refrigerated it am wonderirig if I should feed some of it back to the bees? Removed from 12 frames in two hives so have about 5 quarts.

How much space do you have in your brood boxes? Hopefully you are running at least double deeps for brood, given your northern location… :wink: If there is empty space for honey stores, by all means feed it back to the bees.

The other option is to get a refractometer (moisture meter). You can find them for under $40 on Amazon and eBay. I bought this one, and it is easy to use and works well:

I had to ask the seller to ship the dioptric oil and reference block separately, because they were missing from the original kit, but otherwise it was a very good purchase.

If you are feeding back to the bees put it in a rapid feeder on the top.
OR you could jar and freeze it, taking a jar out as you need to use it for yourself

Use medicinal liquid paraffin, this should calibrate to 24.5%

I added a 3 supper on top of my flow hive. A10 frame one. Screwed some wood strips on each side to close it off as I could not get the narrower one locally and I was worried my Beas might swarm and also needed extras to winter. They have almost filled them so I hope I have enough for wintering them. I will buy a refractometer to check the honey. I will keep it refrigerated for now. I was wondering if I should move the extra supper under the stack? Reading lots on the forum and learning lots.

My bees always do better when I add new brood boxes underneath the existing boxes. In your case, if your new box is 10-frame and your bottom board is 8-frame, you may just want to leave it on top.

I don’t recommend having supper in a bee hive - your tongue might get stung! :smile: