I grow gladiolus sometimes, and they produce a lot of nectar, but there aren’t any pollinators for those flowers around me, so I remove the nectar myself with a syringe. There isn’t a lot in each flower, but it’s nice in a cup of tea.
It doesn’t really taste like honey, even dilute honey. It doesn’t taste like just sugar water, either, though. I’m sure each flowering plant produces a subtly different flavor, like fruit.
And indeed, honey apparently tastes different depending what the bees are feeding on. But I’d say it’s probably a mix of something bee-specific and the nectar itself.
Maybe it’s similar to how tree sap tastes different after you’ve boiled it down to syrup?
Maple sap has a pleasant, very mildly sweet flavor whereas maple syrup is the greatest thing on earth.
Maybe, although the flavor of that probably does change somewhat due to being boiled, just like I imagine the bee concentration/dehydration process adds something.
The math is interesting: it takes 40L of sap to produce 1L of syrup which means only 2.5% of the original sap remains after boiling it. I wonder if it caramelizes slightly from the boiling process.
Have you ever tasted flower nectar?
I grow gladiolus sometimes, and they produce a lot of nectar, but there aren’t any pollinators for those flowers around me, so I remove the nectar myself with a syringe. There isn’t a lot in each flower, but it’s nice in a cup of tea.
It doesn’t really taste like honey, even dilute honey. It doesn’t taste like just sugar water, either, though. I’m sure each flowering plant produces a subtly different flavor, like fruit.
And indeed, honey apparently tastes different depending what the bees are feeding on. But I’d say it’s probably a mix of something bee-specific and the nectar itself.
Maybe it’s similar to how tree sap tastes different after you’ve boiled it down to syrup?
Maple sap has a pleasant, very mildly sweet flavor whereas maple syrup is the greatest thing on earth.
Maybe, although the flavor of that probably does change somewhat due to being boiled, just like I imagine the bee concentration/dehydration process adds something.
The math is interesting: it takes 40L of sap to produce 1L of syrup which means only 2.5% of the original sap remains after boiling it. I wonder if it caramelizes slightly from the boiling process.