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  • From: Blair Christian <blair.christian AT gmail.com>
  • To: ocba AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [ocba] Budget bee food...
  • Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 11:17:55 -0500

So I'll get a little geeky here, that doesn't mean I can deliver.

The cheapest granulated white sugar I've found in the last 2 weeks was
at Kroger (biggest bag ~$0.42/lb), while at costco the big bag is
actually just over $0.50/lb.

All of this clicked when I was at busy bee complaining and they
offered to sell me corn syrup, which is fructose; followed by an
inquiry the next day when I was trying to find some "sunchoke", aka
Helianthus tuberosus, also known as Jeruselum artichoke, which has
high levels of something called "inulin" that can make some people a
little ill. What's inulin you ask, did I mean insulin? No, I meant
inulin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inulin

If you look at the picture you'll see that it's really just a bunch of
fructose all stuck together. So if you had an enzyme to cleave those
bonds, eg "inulase", you could make your own fructose syrup, or high
fructose sunchoke syrup or whatever you want to call it. Is it
practical to do this? Probably not right now. You can't buy inulase
on amazon, but you can buy it's cousin amylase (used to cleave bonds
on glucose polymers)
http://www.eng.umd.edu/~nsw/ench485/lab5.htm

I'm pretty sure I'll never do it, but I was talking with some chemist
friends about it. I'm not sure I could grow starch for $0.41/lb. (or
really, if I placed some value on being local, resourceful, organic,
etc, that number would probably be higher).

So it's really a thinking outside the box kind of idea, but I thought
I'd pass it on. The hard part would be getting the sugar fraction out
and making sure it doesn't have any byproducts that kill the bees and
that it's cheaper than $0.41/lb after paying myself a wage >$0.00/hr.

And I haven't read the "fat bees, skinny bees" yet, either.

Anybody else have any ideas? Teaching bees to plant their favorite
flower seeds?



  • [ocba] Budget bee food..., Blair Christian, 02/23/2012

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