The books / Forage and the Nectar Flow / chapter 11 of 21
Ivy, the last flow
All chapters
- The two-kilometre circle
- Why six kilometres costs more than it brings
- Three and a half kilos of nectar
- What a flow actually is
- Maple, willow and the first dandelions
- Fruit blossom and hawthorn
- The main flow: black locust and clover
- Linden in July
- The gap in the middle of the year
- Goldenrod and the winter stores flow
- Ivy, the last flow
- Oilseed rape, the flow that sets in the comb
- What makes a jar monofloral
- Putting a super on at the start of a flow
- Pulling it at the end
- Reading a capping percentage
- Eighteen point six percent
- Honey that ferments
- Crystallisation is physics, not spoilage
- Creaming by the Dyce method
- A year of varieties and what each is worth
Ivy is the last thing in flower, opening at the tail of the autumn flow and running on into the cold, and on a warm afternoon in October it is loud with bees.
It is missing from the research's variety table entirely, and that absence is the point: almost nobody sells it. Ivy honey sets hard in the comb, often before a keeper can get it out of the frame, and what comes out is difficult to sell.
This game prices it a little under wildflower and sets it in about twenty days, which is a rule of this game and not a figure from the table. Treat it as what it is: winter stores arriving late and free.