> Even around the so called commercial crowd 
> who crow about their per hive production you 
> have to wonder how much HFCS is mix in with 
> their honey since most never remove the 1 
> extra wide feeder/deep box from their hives.

This seems an unfair characterization based upon invalid assumption or
three.

The insult does not fit the harsh practical realities of a commercial
operation. 

First, when my bees were pollinating apples, they were often LOSING weight
while doing so.  Colonies can literally starve on sequential apple contracts
if one is not vigilant about hive weights, that's how poor the nectar and
pollen are from some of the hybrid varieties.  This problem is made worse by
cold rain that interrupts the pollination work and keeps the bees shivering
in their hives.  Second, reconfiguring hives is a costly, labor-intensive
task, so I can understand why many operations would rather leave an empty
feeder in place than replace it with combs.  Some "good ideas" don't scale
well, and opening thousands of brood chambers just to swap out frame feeders
sounds like a looser to me, and I'd have to get the right numbers of  frames
to the hives and put the feeders "away" somewhere.  I'd have to think about
that one, even if the distance is only 100 miles, and the number of colonies
is only 600 or so.  

But it does not follow that the feed would be continued long enough
contaminate a honey crop.  For me, putting my hives on tulip poplar, then on
sourwood, and/or basswood came well after pollination contracts were
finished.  My northernmost pollinating hives, working up near the MD border
would have come  back south at least 100 miles for a tree bloom to make a
crop on, but well before then the bees would be foraging on dandelions and
other "understory" plants, as only the most intelligent few of my clients
would keep their understory mowed to keep the bees focused on the apple
blooms.

Feed is a cost for commercial beekeepers, and if "engineering is doing for
62 cents what any damnfool might do for a dollar", then beekeeping is the
art of making something from nothing at all, so successful beekeepers tend
to be stingy with consumable inputs that cost money to buy, and cost more
money to deploy.  Worse yet, if the bees don't eat the feed before they are
moved, now all the hives are heavier, and maybe the truck is overweight at
the scales for beekeepers unskilled in avoiding open weigh stations.  

Lastly, very few operations of any serious size do their own bottling, so
they are selling drums to a packer, who runs every test in the book, if for
no other reason than to be an excuse for offering a lower price per pound.
I was small enough to be able to bottle and wholesale cases of honey to
retailer health food stores, bypassing even the food distributors.  But this
level of vertical integration is rare for modern commercial operations, as
the minimum viable size of operation has increased several times since the
1990s.  (I have to keep reminding myself that the 90s were 30 years ago.)

But disparagement among beekeepers tends to always be in the third person
plural voice.  The conjugation is invariably "MY bees are great, YOUR bees
may need looking at, HIS bees are weak, THEIR bees are collapsing".

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