Abstract
Abstract Honey's reputation for its various both nutritional and medicinal benefits and pleasant taste ensures a sustained high demand for the product all over the world. However, honey supply is quite limited and seldom meets the demand, and consequently the product commands a relatively high price and is exposed to adulteration and imitation. Honey was adulterated with glucose syrup weight of 10%, 50%, 70% and 90%, and each sample was analysed. Pure honey at ambient temperatures exhibits peculiar non-Newtonian rheological behaviour. Adulteration with glucose syrup (a Newtonian fluid) drags its viscosity towards Newtonian flow behaviour. Malcolm Cross and Ostwald-de Waele Power-Law models were used to fit the rheological data, and the former fitted better than the latter. The behaviour indices in both models increased with increasing adulteration of honey with glucose syrup. Chromatographic characterizations of honey which provides an acceptable measure of honey quality corroborated the conclusions derived from the rheological characterization of this study.
Highlights
Honey is the natural sweet substance produced by honeybees from the nectar of plants or secretions of living parts of plants
This study explores the efficacy of a rheological characterization method to answer this need
Tab. 1 shows the sample details and sensory evaluation of samples used in the present study
Summary
Honey is the natural sweet substance produced by honeybees from the nectar of plants or secretions of living parts of plants. It is formed from the excretions of plant-sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store, and left in the honey-comb to ripen and mature (Codex Alimentarius, 2001). James et al (2009) studied the effect of temperature on the rheology of Nigerian honey and focused on samples from the North-Central region of Nigeria. The major problem of the honey industry in Nigeria and other developing countries of the world is adulteration with foreign materials, but the tedious and expensive nature of conventional methods of adulteration detection is problematic.
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