Technique for washing nectar from the flowers of Tasmanian leatherwood ( Eucryphia lucida Eucryphiaceae)

The technique for extracting floral nectar using micropipettes is often unsuited to flowers where nectar is produced in very small volumes and/or where nectar is highly viscous. An alternative technique for washing the viscous nectar from the flowers of Tasmanian leatherwood, Eucryphia lucida (Labill.) is described. Here, two washes with a known volume of distilled water removed 95% of total floral sugar. Using such a washing technique on exposed and bagged E. lucida flowers provided information on nectar production in this species that could not have been obtained using a standard micropipette extraction method.