I don't believe they can burn 1/2 pound of honey in between 24 and 48 hour trip without taking some kind of cleansing flight.
Your problem here is in burning Honey vs. Pollens. Like Mr. Bush says, Honey is carbohydrate, that breaks down into CO
2 and H
2O, or Carbon Dioxide and Water Vapor. Cleansing flights are almost always from eating solids. So drinking syrup, and burning the honey they stomached wouldn't entirely build up wastes in their GI tract. A few days without a flight probably wouldn't cause a mess. Having months at a time without any relief would cause problems.
In this case, you have 10,000 tiny bodies trying to keep their metabolism. I can imagine a cup of honey/syrup would be burned in 2 days. When they're foraging, they eat that as nectar, they process the excess as honey. I can't say what the maple flow is like in NY, I'm down here in Alabama, and the Maples start blooming in January here.