Abstract
The higher demand and limited availability of honey led to different forms of honey adulteration. Honey adulteration is either direct by addition of various syrups to natural honey or indirect by feeding honey bees with sugar syrups. Therefore, a need has emerged for reliable and cost-effective quality control methods to detect honey adulteration in order to ensure both safety and quality of honey. In this study, honey is adulterated by feeding honey bees with various proportions of sucrose syrup (0 to 100%). Various physiochemical properties of the adulterated honey are studied including sugar profile, pH, acidity, moisture, and color. The results showed that increasing sucrose syrup in the feed resulted in a decrease in glucose and fructose contents significantly, from 33.4 to 29.1% and 45.2 to 35.9%, respectively. Sucrose content, however, increased significantly from 0.19 to 1.8%. The pH value increased significantly from 3.04 to 4.63 with increase in sucrose feed. Acidity decreased slightly but nonsignificantly with increase in sucrose feed and varied between 7.0 and 4.00 meq/kg for 0% and 100% sucrose, respectively. Honey’s lightness (L value) also increased significantly from 59.3 to 68.84 as sucrose feed increased. Other color parameters were not significantly changed by sucrose feed. K-means clustering is used to classify the level of honey adulteration by using the above physiological properties. The classification results showed that both glucose content and total sugar content provided 100% accurate classification while pH values provided the worst results with 52% classification accuracy. To further predict the percent honey adulteration, simulated annealing coupled with artificial neural networks (SA-ANNs) was used with sugar profile as an input. RBF-ANN was found to provide the best prediction results with SSE = 0.073, RE = 0.021, and overall R2 = 0.992. It is concluded that honey sugar profile can provide an accurate and reliable tool for detecting indirect honey adulteration by sucrose solution.
Highlights
Honey is a natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from secretions and nectars of plants
HPLC-RID Sugar Profile. e feeding effect of different sugar proportions to honey bees on glucose, fructose, and sucrose content is shown in Table 1. e glucose and fructose content decreased significantly from 33.4 to 29.06% and from 45.2 to 35.9%, respectively, as the amount of sucrose syrup increased in the feed. e sum of glucose and fructose contents was higher than the standard value for all treatments as reported by Codex Alimentarius [1] and not less than 65 g/100 g according to the Jordanian standard. e sucrose content on the other hand increased significantly from 0.19 to 1.80% as sucrose syrup percentage increased in the feed
Fructose content is observed to be more sensitive to sucrose adulteration since the difference between control and 10% sucrose adulteration was more evident (45.2 and 39.8%, respectively). e high contents of glucose and fructose in sucrose-fed honey were explained by Guler et al [32] who reported that 95% of the sucrose given to bees was converted to glucose and fructose by the invertase enzyme responsible for the breakdown of sucrose and secreted by worker bees from hypopharyngeal glands [33]
Summary
Honey is a natural sweet substance produced by honey bees from secretions and nectars of plants. Transform, and combine honey with specific substances of their own, deposit and store it in honey combs to ripen and mature [1]. Honey is has diverse composition, appearance, and sensory conception; it is composed of sugars, mainly fructose and glucose, in addition to other 25 different oligosaccharides. It contains small amounts of proteins, Journal of Food Quality enzymes, amino acids, minerals, trace elements, vitamins, and polyphenols [2]. It has some important medicinal properties such as antibacterial, anticancer, hepatoprotective, hypoglycemic, antihypertensive, and antioxidant properties [3]
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