Progress in Analytical Methods for the Characterization, Quality and Safety of the Beehive Products

The honeybee is one of the oldest forms of animal life, already present since the Neolithic. The origin of the bond between man and honeybees dates back almost 10,000 years. Primeval humans gathered and ate the honey and honeycombs of wild bees, the only available sweetener at that time, up to 7000 BC. Honey is a food consisting of a very complex mixture of nutrients and bioactive compounds, endowed with outstanding nutritional value and many recognized biological activities. Nonetheless, bees also produce and store in hives many other products of enormous interest to humans. Although honey is the most famous of hive products, propolis, bee bread, royal jelly, beeswax, and bee venom are also of great value. Most of them have been objects of increasing interest to the global scientific community, as a growing number of studies have discovered their nutraceutical or pharmaceutical effects on human health. For many of these products, nutrition and/or biological activity is closely linked to their origin. Whereas the botanical origin is of the highest importance in defining the quality of honey and pollen, the assignment of geographical origin is decisive for that of propolis, beeswax and royal jelly. In addition, adulteration processes or the fraudulent assignment of a specific geographic origin to a hive product can result in an unfair increase in market shares and prices to the detriment of authentic products. In addition, bees and hive products can act as effective biomonitoring matrices for the ascertainment of the level of environmental quality. Beyond the definition of the quality of hive products, identification of traces of toxic elements, of persistent organic pollutants and of residues of drugs or phytosanitary products may provide a reliable map of environmental conditions in the ecosystems close to the hive. Of course, the characterization of these matrices in terms of reliable determination of minority or of trace amounts of organic or inorganic analytes is an increasingly challenging task. New techniques and methods of analysis are needed to achieve this, and only the continuous updating of ever more powerful and multivariate approaches to data processing is necessary to ensure reliable responses to today’s global consumers.