Okay, thanks Lone. I've only been beekeeping for about a year and yet to do a decent extraction. Your advice is greatly appreciated.
From what I understand, most people confine their bees to a single deep box over the winter. I actually left a couple of mine as doubles since they started building in the top super and I figured it may as well stay there so they could use the stores if they needed them and so the frames would be 'safe' as you say. Why is it that people don't generally store their frames in a top super over the winter to protect them? I would not think that heat loss through an empty super would be much different to a ventilated lid.
Anyway, thanks for that and I assume the idea is that the frames would be left there until the weather warms up and the honey is extractable. Only problem is that I won't have enough hives for them all unless I build skyscrapers so I'll have to keep some sealed up. I don't know how long the honey has been in the frames, it looked like it had all been stored for years.
Yes, I intend doing some splits and buying some ligurian queens to make some new colonies when the weather warms up.