CHEMICAL AND PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF SOME EGYPTIAN AND LIBYAN HONEYS

Abstract

Six different types of Egyptian honeys (Citrus, Clover, and Cotton) and Libyan honeys (Rabeay, Sidir and Thymus) were collected from different regions and studied. The aim of the present work was to describe honeys, in order to contribute to their characterization for commercial purposes. Samples were physicochemical and sensory examined using a quantitative descriptive analysis method. It could be concluded that Libyan honeys had the highest viscosity values than the Egyptian honeys. It is not surprising that potassium (K+) was quantitavely the most important mineral present higher values of 1934.7 ppm. Meanwhile, manganese was the inferior of all honey types ranged from (1-1.5 ppm) in citrus and thymus honeys, respectively. Sidir honey from Wady El Hay was outstanding superior for the contents of Mn (5 ppm) than all the other tested honeys. Citrus honey was the inferior from all of the others honeys for Ca, Mg, Na, K, Fe and Mn. Proline the most important from a quantitative point of view was followed by Aspartic amino acids. Sidir honey has the highest values of NH4. Thymus honey has the highest number of total amino acids of all samples followed by Cotton honey represented by 6.080 and 4.920 mg/g., respectively. Whereas, Rabeay honey was the least in total amino acids, represented by 0.488 mg/g. Thymus and Citrus honeys contain the largest number of amino acids of all honeys but thymus was superior to citrus honey in quantities of amino acids existing. Honeys were correctly classified according to its floral origin. Further studies are needed in order to investigate other floral origins to provide a robust model to classify honey samples from this region.