The books / Forage and the Nectar Flow / chapter 16 of 21
Reading a capping percentage
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
Capping is the bees' own signature on a frame. They seal a cell with wax when the moisture in it is right and not before, which makes the capped fraction the one honest reading a keeper has without instruments.
The rule of thumb is roughly 80 percent or more of the cells capped before a frame comes off; some guidance is stricter and wants the frame capped from edge to edge, some looser and will accept a little over 70.
For a second opinion there is the shake test. Hold the frame horizontally over the hive and jerk it down sharply.