Two buckets of wet cappings in my basement since September — how do I store them until I've got time to render?

Ontario, second year. I extracted in early September, dumped the cappings into two food-grade buckets with lids, and told myself I'd render the wax on a weekend. That weekend hasn't happened and it's now the middle of October. I opened one yesterday and it isn't good. There's a layer of honey in the bottom, the top is a sticky mat, and there's a definite cidery smell — I assume fermentation, since the honey in there has been sitting wet and picking up moisture from the air. What I want to know is what the right procedure is, both for rescuing these two buckets and for next year. Do I render the whole lot as it is and accept a darker wax? Can the honey at the bottom be saved for anything — baking, mead — or is fermented honey just a loss? And what should I have done in September: drain the cappings properly, rinse them, dry them, freeze them? I'd also like to know how people store dry rendered wax over winter, because I've got a couple of kilos of blocks in a cardboard box and I now don't trust any of my storage decisions.