Argentine Beekeepers' Magazine

(Espacio Apícola - October 3rd, 2024) European professional beekeepers, alarmed by the lack of sales, the presence of a large amount of honey at very low prices in certain supermarket chains and the publication of the European Union last year indicating that 46% of imported honey is adulterated, they carried out their own market research and arrive at the conclusion that in the supermarkets where they bought honey to analyze, 80% of the samples were adulterated honey or directly a fake product, which emulates honey and is sold as such.

They bought 29 jars labeled as "honey" in different supermarkets in different towns in Germany and added a jar of honey purchased from a well-known beekeeper as a control sample. They took the samples to internationally recognised laboratories for testing. All the samples complied with European regulations. However, Bernhard Heuvel, president of the European Professional Beekeepers' Association (EPBA) and vice-president of the German Professional and Commercial Beekeepers' Association (DBIB), he says these adulterated or fake products are so cheap that they cannot be honey, but not only that, "when you taste (fake) honey, its texture, smell and taste are strange to the palate of a professional beekeeper. Its flavour explodes and disappears immediately, while the taste of real honey lingers in the mouth".

This confirmed what is offered on internet platforms such as ALIBABA, where syrups that emulate honey are offered and sold with the guarantee of passing the strictest analyses that are still recognised as official methods (LC/MS; HRMS, NMR). Today, genetic engineering can "program" bacteria such as Bacillus subtilis to copy the sugar profile of any honey and reproduce it from starch syrups, according to information released by Bernhard in this video published by the EPBA on Vimeo.

The alternative was found in Estonia, where Mr. Mario Kalvet, vice-president of the EPBA and president of the Estonian Beekeepers' Union, is from, and Mr. Peeter Matson, who we spoke to yesterday, also a beekeeper and co-founder of NORDMEL, one of the most important beekeeping companies in Estonia. They took the same 30 samples tested by the German laboratories and brought them to the Food Metagenomics Laboratory of the Celvia Laboratory in Estonia. Celvia is mainly dedicated to studies of genetic alterations in humans, but among its other activities it has this food metagenomics laboratory directed by Kairi Raime PhD who received the samples personally brought by Bernhard Heuvel.

There, the honey is subjected to a nucleotide sequencing of the DNA present in the honey, from 10 to 20 million sequences, and in this way, plants, bacteria, all groups of organisms that interacted and left their trace in the product are identified, including people, bee pathogens, the bees themselves, viruses! Everything. The sequencing describes all the organisms involved, their composition, the proportion in which they participate and their concentration. If this does not fit the profiles of authentic honey, then it is a fraudulent product (see the graph that illustrates this note).

Of the 30 samples that initially passed the various tests in the German laboratories, only three passed the metagenomic analysis for honey (among them the beekeeper's sample that was the control sample), two samples barely passed with comments on some striking aspects and the remaining 25 samples did not pass the test, they did not have a DNA profile characteristic of honey. In other words, 80% of the samples acceptable for EU controls were honey adulterated according to this technique.

In light of the finding, the EPBA is urging member associations and inviting interested parties around the world to carry out the same test: buy jars labelled as honey on supermarket shelves and send them to a laboratory to make a MDA (Metagenomic DNA Analysis) to check their authenticity. Then there will be a proposal to adopt this technique for the control of products offered as honey on the European and global market. Visit the site of the initiative to "Clean up the Honey Market" HERE.

The Estonian laboratory provides for each analysis the documentation with the results and a link where the interested party can see all the information in a stepped and interactive pie chart where the initial access is to the root of the analyzed product, where the image shows the proportions of each identified sequence, then each step can be selected, such as the central one, for example, the intervening flora and the graph is rearranged showing "plants" in the center and around the different steps according to family, genus and species in the proportion in which they appear in the sample and reaching each particular species. Amazing! Clearly allowed also to identify monofloral honeys or geographic markers, see an example on the laboratory website HERE.

Fernando Esteban