I'm beginning to think along those lines.
Batch 4 is not as hard but crumbly. Recipe under. Have the wrong temps? Should I get e texture like Apifond.
1 liter water
4 kg sugar
100g glucose syrup
1 boil water melt syrup in it
2 add all suger bring to heat 116 'c
3 stir occationally while cooling until texture is relatively thick
4 place on table top and knead until cool.
-- the idea is to get tiny crystals out of the solution. So cool it until it begins to crystallise, then stir/beat/fold as vigorously as you can, while simultaneously cooling as hard as you can.
-- my (limited) experience, but with a calibrated thermometer, is that 116 is slightly too far. Going to a lower boiling point is going to leave you a wetter result.
-- the glucose has a number of effects. One is to upset the sucrose crystallisation by simply getting in the way. Honey has a much higher Glucose content. Adding more shouldn't do any harm. But its expensive if bought in 140g tubes of syrup. 500g of Glucose powder in the health food shop was cheaper than 140g syrup in the supermarket. Caterers and confectioners buy syrup in BIG tubs much more cheaply, but the health food shop (Holland & Barratt) was fine for the price/quantity/convenience compromise.
While I was there, I also bought 500g of Fructose. It too is in honey, and has the useful property of attracting water (it is 'hygroscopic') and needs to be kept in a sealed container unless you want it to turn itself into syrup.
-- lower BP, more Glucose, plus added Fructose gave me a nice mix. Definitely on the firm side of 'gloopy', a stiff enough paste that it wouldn't run away too quickly under its own weight. The bees were happy with it (even if they didn't need it) whereas they just ignored the harder product of the standard recipe (I presume they needed to add more water than they could afford to do anything with it).
I recycled my first efforts by heating in a low oven (less than 100C) to redissolve. No reboiling needed (so I can't tell you what the BP of my mix ended up at), just stirring in quite small quantities of water and the Glucose & Fructose, warm it again, stir, warm and repeat until adequately dissolved, or bored. Cool and beat hard whenever it starts to crystallise.
Nice
white product and the bees survived it!
I wondered about using the kitchen mixer for the stirring, but I don't want to risk burning it out!
