>>> We know  bees can't survive on canola honey 
>>> due to being hard. Despite too much canola  
>>> honey stored in hives bees die from starvation.

>> Here in the UK the bees, Apis mellifera mellifera, 
>> must have wintered largely on crystallised ivy 
>> honey  since we became an island and the ice 
>> retreated about 20,000 years ago.

> Not only that, but a lot of people have success 
> feeding hard blocks of sugar candy in winter. 
> I wonder what factors are involved in the 
> apparent difference in these reports.

I think that the difference may be that canola honey forms exceptionally
large crystals.
It seems that the bees have problems dealing with such a large crystal.
I've helped a beekeeper who had this problem, and we tried to get the bees
to do the work, so that at least the combs could be salvaged.

When cleaning out crystallized frames that have been uncapped by the
beekeeper, bees will drop some of the crystals on the bottom board, and
carry out some (maybe most?) of the crystals as if they were garbage.

If a frame is uncapped and then placed into the brood chamber, the heat of
the brood chamber seems to be sufficient to allow the bees to better-utilize
the crystalized honey. No crystals on bottom boards or being carried out as
trash and left on the landing board in pre-dawn hours.  But this would be
"one frame at a time", a very slow way to reclaim several supers of
crystalized frames.

The above is the sum total of our experimentation, done during the dearth
period, when it was realized that this stuff was not going to extract.

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