Ups and downs.. evaporation?

There was much discussion about whether all the weight gained by the hive was nectar, and how much would subsequently be lost by evaporation.

Turns out to be quite a lot.

Nectar is reportedly 80%+ water, whereas honey is typically less than 20% water. So in theory you will lose 6/10ths of the volume before it's honey. I was curious to see how long it would take the bees to evaporate the nectar into honey, and sort of expected it to take place in warmer weather.

Nope. Apparently the night time is the right time for evaporation. At least that's my best guess as to what is happening.

All the bees are in there flapping their wings to keep the brood warm, and it seems they are evaporating at the same time. Hive weight seems to peak around 5:30pm right now, and steadily decreases throughout the night, leveling off around 5am.

[ update, did some math, and by weight the nectar to honey ratio is about 9:4, eg 9 lbs of nectar becomes 4 lbs of honey ]

I think i'll start using the weight at 5am as the reference point for how much was gained that day, since the hour-by-hour haul during the day varies so much, and the evaporation seems to continue through the night.

Oh, you want a graph? of course you do:


The purple line on top is today's readings, pink is yesterday, and the light blue is the day-over-day difference between the two. The day-over-day was offset by +100 to get it to all show up on the same graph.

So the net from yesterday (as tabulated at 5am, after most of the evaporation) was about 1.5lbs, and today remains to be seen, but it looks like it'll be around a pound. It's hard to tell what will happen; the weight peaked earlier today vs yesterday, so i'm hoping they got a head start on the evaporation.. We'll have to wait till 5am to find out.

I think I'll wait till 8am or so ;)

busy bees, either way.