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.