>  Someone has suggested leaving them in the packages in a warm dark 
spot along with feeding syrup until the weather changes. What are your 
thoughts?

The rule, as I recall is that nine days is the longest bees should 
remain in the packages.

If you know for sure when they were shaken, you can gauge by that, but 
sometimes it is hard to know, since some producers pool packages from 
several smaller beekeepers who bring them to a central point.  There is 
always the question of how reliable the information given is, too, since 
the supplier knows what beekeepers want to hear and might 'forget' that 
the packages are older than they recall.

As for holding the hives inside, I don't know what the limit is, but if 
the temperature is down around freezing and the room entirely dark, 
months is not out of the question.  After all, people winter bees 
indoors.  At higher temperatures and humidity, the bees may not last too 
well, but a few days should be OK.

Absolute darkness is a must, though, since bees will crawl to any 
pinhole of light.  There are pictures on my site of installing packages 
into EPS nucs.
See http://www.honeybeeworld.com/diary/articles/pkgnucs.htm
I don't recall how long they kept these indoors.

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