Scott, 

It's my understanding you DNA tested some honey samples in the hopes of gaining insight into the botanical origins of the honey. But now that you've read more about it, you've realized inferring nectar source from residual pollen is a bit of a confusing mess. Some pollens overrepresent, some underrepresent, some appear to be incidentally present, and some are actually key indicators of botanical origin. 

In your particular area, without the help of an expert, you have to figure out for yourself the relationship between the results you got and the botanical origin of the honey. 

So here's a suggestion. You have a really cool dataset. Hopefully you have the original honey samples still. You could collect a bunch of data from them too: the colour, texture, and detailed flavour profiles of each one. 

An example is that cool report Pat just shared, in which they got a read-out of the sourwood content of the honeys. If they went back to the honeys and collected additional data, they'd start to understand the impact sourwood nectar has on the flavour profile, colour, and texture of honey. They would be able to train themselves to ID not only presence/absence but also the concentration of sourwood in honey without testing going forward. 

Your task is a little more exploratory because it doesn't sound like you got such a helpful report. You'll have to do it yourself: if you have a range of different results from your samples, you should be able to learn whether knotweed is the dominant flavour in your honey and what contribution, if any, Artemisia is making to the flavour. You might learn plantain pollen has zero impact on honey flavour or you might decide to call your honey "plantain" if it seems to be the dominant species affecting the flavour of the honey (for the record, I would be incredulous if that were the case). 

From looking at your results, I would take a stab and guess your honey is mostly knotweed. I'd be curious to know if your visual and taste testing corroborates that guess. 
 
Tracey
Alberta, Canada

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