Our Story
The Question That Started Everything
It started with a single afternoon at a hummingbird feeder — and a question that turned out to have a surprisingly interesting answer.
Like most backyard birders, we had been mixing sugar and water for years. Four parts water, one part sugar. Stir. Done. And the hummingbirds came, so we figured that was enough.
Then one day, out of pure curiosity, we wondered: what exactly is in the real thing? What does a hummingbird actually get when it pushes its beak into a trumpet vine on a July morning — and how different is that from what we're pouring into a feeder?
We started reading. We found peer-reviewed studies. We followed citations. We ordered papers on nectar chemistry that most people will never need to read. And what we discovered changed the way we thought about every bag of sugar we'd ever mixed.
What We Found
Real flower nectar is not just sugar water.
It's sugar-rich, yes — but it also carries trace electrolytes: potassium (the dominant mineral, making up nearly 90% of the cation fraction in hummingbird-pollinated flowers), calcium, magnesium, and sodium. It contains trace amino acids — the same building blocks that make up protein — including compounds like glutamine and proline. The nectar of Aquilegia canadensis, the Eastern Red Columbine, contains a complete and unique metabolomic fingerprint documented in a published scientific study.
None of that is in plain sugar water.
More importantly: different flowers make different nectar. The trumpet vine's nectar is dominated by sucrose — at 73%, it's the most sucrose-rich of any commonly studied North American hummingbird flower. The cardinal flower has a different profile. The columbine has its own. The bee balm is distinct again.
We had stumbled onto something that no hummingbird nectar product on the market had ever attempted: formulating nectar to actually mirror specific flowers.
What We Built
Nectary exists because of that question. We built four varieties — Trumpet Vine, Cardinal Flower, Wild Columbine, and Bee Balm — each one formulated after the published nectar chemistry of its namesake flower.
We start with pure white cane sugar, because that's the foundation of every hummingbird-pollinated flower on earth. Then we add a carefully calibrated blend of food-grade trace electrolytes and amino acids in concentrations that mirror what the flowers actually produce.
No red dye. No artificial colors. No preservatives. No shortcuts. Just the closest thing to real flower nectar we know how to make.
What We Believe
We believe that the hummingbirds visiting your feeder deserve the same quality they'd get from the best garden in the neighborhood.
We believe that the people who feed them — who fill feeders before the sun is up, who clean them every few days through the summer heat, who feel a little thrill every single time a bird appears — deserve a product that respects their care and takes the science as seriously as they take the birds.
And we believe that bringing a little more nature into the backyard is one of the most quietly meaningful things a person can do.
Nectary is for the watchers. The gardeners. The people who know which variety of columbine the hummingbirds prefer. We made this for you.
All Nectary formulations are informed by published peer-reviewed research on hummingbird-pollinated flower nectar chemistry, including work published in Ecology and Evolution, PLOS ONE, Frontiers in Plant Science, and Biology Letters.