In which we field a cool chemistry question from a bee-keeper relative.
A bee-keeping relative had a question for me recently. Over the winter, he feeds the bees by mixing up table sugar with water, making it acidic (with vinegar) and heating it. His question was: what is happening chemically? WELL: as it turns out, he is making invert sugar. Invert sugar is really a term from baking, but chemically the process he is doing is called “hydrolysis.” Table sugar is mainly sucrose. One sucrose molecule is actually made up of 2 simpler sugars bound together chemically - one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule. By acidifying and heating the sucrose, it is broken apart into two separate molecules. Scientifically, this is called hydrolysis - using water (hydro) to cut (lysis) the sucrose molecule in half. So the thing I did not know (which I have never thought to wonder, so I looked it up!) is that honey gets its sweetness from glucose and fructose. So then the whole thing comes together: by acidifying and heating the table sugar, you are making it into something very similar to honey. I bet the bees love it. Here, Ophelia and I put the sugar mixture onto glucose detecting test strips before and after heating. And it works!
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In Which We Take the pH of Everything
I got some fancy litmus test paper strips from Fisher Scientific. It is fun to own something that is more often an analogy than a thing - but I digress. We started pHing everything in the house - trying to guess which would be acidic and which would be basic. There are a lot more acidic things in the house so far. And bleach? It bleaches litmus paper.
The Shortest USB Cable in the World
In today’s mail I got the shortest USB cable in the world. It makes me SO happy. I have been programming my Arduino microcontroller board with a long flippy floppy printer cable. Silly Me. It is so awesome to have just the right tool. (It is actually a USB type A male to USB type B male adapter. But it works like a cable.)
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