It turns out that floating acorns is a very quick way of selecting the good from the bad. The bad acorns float and the good acorns sink. In fact after floating them I found that the majority of the remaining acorns very unfortunately floated and failed the float/sink test. So how effective is this test anyway? I decided to dissect a number of good and bad acorns to see really how effective this test is. Results are shown in the following photos.
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| Floaters |
Evidently all the floaters were bad.
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| Sinkers |
The sinkers were evidently in generally very good condition. However a number of the sinkers still had larvae exit holes so this test is not 100%.
At some point the larvae should stop emerging so at that point we should be able to determine that all remaining acorns are clean. I can't store the nuts in a plastic bag if there are any larvae remaining.
The number of remaining acorns was sufficiently low to count them and 370 acorns are left. That is a loss of 71% of the nuts or a survival rate of 29% and I don't think it is over yet and more losses are expected.
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