The books / Forage and the Nectar Flow / chapter 2 of 21
Why six kilometres costs more than it brings
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
Bees can fly a great deal further than two kilometres. The question is whether it pays. Out to about 6.4 kilometres, four miles, the weight a forager brings home still exceeds the energy she spent fetching it; past that the flight costs more than it brings.
In poor country they go anyway. A waggle-dance study on heather moor read a median of 6.1 kilometres and a mean of 5.5, with a tenth of the dances pointing beyond 9.5, and the longest recorded flights are about that: nine or ten kilometres, paid for in wing wear and a shorter forager life. In this game a plant is worth its full value out to two kilometres, about a third of it at 6.4, and nothing at all past 9.5.