Cleaning the frames

Once the honey has been extracted, there is the question of what to do with the supers and the empty frames.
How ever much the frames are spun, there will be be some amount of honey left in them and they are called 'wet' frames.
There are various things you can do with them and I tend to just stack them at the end of the garden and ratchet strap them together to keep the mice and creepy crawlies out. When they are needed next year, if there is some crystallised honey in them, you just spray them with water and put them back on the hive and let the bees sort things out.

Another thing you can do is put them back on the hive for the bees to clean them out and make them 'dry'.

Normally supers are put above the queen excluder and below the crown board.
If you put them back above the brood box this way, they may start putting honey in them again and you don't want them to do this as during winter they huddle up in the brood box and might not find the honey in the super.
So the super is put above the crown board and below the roof and the bees now see the super as being something completely external to the hive and take the honey and put it in the brood box frames.
Once the super is 'dry' its taken off and stored.

I am getting ready to do the second, and last, extraction of the year and was sorting out the stored supers to make room for the ones coming off the hives. Two had a bit of honey in them and being lazy I decided to leave them at the end of the garden to let the bees clean them.
As expected the power of The Waggle Dance [I will do a blog about this] kicked in. Quite quickly a few bees showed some interest and as news spread around the hives, the frames became covered in bees taking the honey.

It can look a bit intimidating and they are quite noisy. However despite what the Daily Mail might think, as they don't have a hive to defend they are quite calm, and I did the video without any bee keeping kit on. I wasn't stung but a bee did fly into my ear. It didn't sting me.

The video is here