The books / Forage and the Nectar Flow / chapter 3 of 21
Three and a half kilos of nectar
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
Nectar is mostly water. Depending on the plant it runs anywhere from a fifth to nine tenths water when the bee takes it, and finished capped honey is about 17 to 18 percent. Everything between those two numbers has to be fanned out of the hive as vapour.
The usual ratio is three to four kilos of nectar for one kilo of honey, and it can be as steep as ten to one where the nectar is very dilute; roughly 20 to 25 percent of the raw nectar weight survives as honey. Call it three and a half kilos in for one kilo out, about 22 percent retained. That is why a strong flow shows on the hive scales days before it shows in the jar.