Very old Bee hive "help"

Any honey in there should be safe.

Honey is fine. If it don't go bad sitting on the table in a jar, it's not going to go bad in the comb capped where air can't get to it. Should be some good eating.

Set a new brood box on top and wait for the bees to move up into it. When the queen is found and laying up above old equipment, put a queen excluder under the new box so she can't lay downstairs. In 21 days there will only be old comb and honey. The bees will move it up too given time. How did you come into possession of this treasure?

No! Not safe!!! Don't even think about it. Send it to me and I take care of it.

All jokes aside it's fine. The one caveat to what VanceG says is make sure there are no eggs below when you put on the queen excluder. If there are the bees down there will turn some of them into queens and you'll find a queen down there laying again in 21-28 days or so. I find it's best to go through the excluded hive and remove and queen cells you find a week after she's been excluded elsewhere. I normally take the frame(s) with the Q cells and split a 10 frame nuc into 2 5 frame nucs. I then put in the Q cell frame into the recently made queenless nuc and let nature take it's course. It's hard to have too many queens or nucs.

I just notched frames of eggs and two day old larvae and moved them above queen excluders and a super to try to get some lazy man queens. Not one queen cell resulted even with a deep between the bees and the frame of brood. Not doubting Mr Coates experience, just not mine.

Great propolis factory there, too. Yep, time to rotate that old comb. Hope you have a strong arm, and a sharp hive tool.

A church friend kids raised bees for a little time and when they left for adult hood no one took over caring for the bees. So they asked me if i wanted it and of course i jumped all over that offer. It weighed about 150 lbs. it wasn fun moving it into a pickup truck bed.