When will our girls Finnish Capping the Honey?

[Michael Bush]

>Do you know how bees ripen honey?  Do they suck out the moisture, or fan, or something else?  I've heard they ripen it at night.

The first step happens when they first get the nectar and mix it with various enzymes that change the sugars and add some other qualities to the honey.  In particular invertase (which splits the sugars) and Inhibine (which causes the honey to give off hydrogen peroxide) and Diastase (which breaks any starches in the nectar into sugars). 

The second step is to dry it by evaporation.  They spread it out in many cells to give it surface area and they fan to control the ventilation.

[rawfind]

Since the other thread where this was mentioned, I took out one of the frames that had a section that wasn't capped. I used uncapping/scratcher fork thing to scrape over the uncapped section purposefully damaging the cells. Today in between rain I checked and the "damaged" section wass repaired and fully capped.
This frame had maybe a 5x5cm section that wasn't capped. Doing what I did probably isn't best practice but it was an interesting experiment.

hey thats quite interesting , those girls are not always predictable, will bee interesting to see what they've done with the frame i extracted.

[rawfind]

From the Australasian Bee Manual:

"

"As I have already pointed out, during a heavy flow of honey, when it is left in the hive to ripen it is neces-sary to keep adding top boxes to take advantage of the flow, as the honey will be stored faster than it can be ripened. 

This might be close to what is happening, maybe they are just busy bringing more in?

[Lone]

Terrific experiment, Shane.  I might give it a try next time.

Lone