The books / Forage and the Nectar Flow / chapter 17 of 21
Eighteen point six percent
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
Behind the wax cap there is a number. The target is 18.6 percent water or less, which is the United States Grade A standard and the figure most of the trade works to.
You can read it off a single drop with a refractometer, though both basic and precise models need calibrating and reading at a steady temperature.
There is a second way of saying the same thing, water activity, which in honey runs about 0.5 to 0.65; holding it below roughly 0.60 is the physical barrier that stops anything growing. The wax cap is the bees' own version of that instrument.