Wet Storage

With the honey crop extracted the supers need to be stored over winter. I used a couple to house feeders but most of them went to the out apiary for storage.

Behold: The sticking power of propolis

You can store supers dry or wet. This refers to whether they still have residual honey in the combs (wet) or if the bees have picked them clean (dry). What you choose is up to you but the advantage of storing them wet is waxmoth don't like honey whereas the advantage of storing them dry is they're less messy to handle although the honey may attract other pests. Obviously you can't sterilised wax honeycomb with a blowtorch. The usual method is to use acetic acid fumes. You pop a plate with a pad soaked in acetic acid at the top to the stack then close them up. The acetic acid evaporates killing pretty much anything living in the supers.

Acetic acid pad

I stacked up 16 supers in two lots of eight under a lean to I'd attached to one side of my shed. The hive roofs on each stack protrudes from under the lean to a bit so I used plastic shopfitting material I pulled from a skip to direct rain away.

Won't open these for a few months.