"What am I doing that would result in my honey being rejected?'

As long as your drying room is no warmer than 90 deg F there is no analytical technique in the world that is going to detect such drying.  It gets that hot in a bee hive.  We all know that at some higher temp and time combination you can make too much HMF.  There is some HMF naturally occuring in honey, so the question becomes how much is too much.

I personally am skeptical about using NMR all by itself to id "fake" honey.  The lab I ran did lots and lots of NMR.  I have personally run hundreds of NMR spectra including advanced techniques like multiple resonance decoupling, spin tickling and nuclear Overhouser effect enhancements.  Like any analytical technique when used correctly it is a powerful tool and when used improperly it produces garbage.  The problem I see with using NMR on honey is there are so many honeys from different sources you can easy end up with blends that fit nothing in your library.  There also is a technical issue.  Carbon 13 NMR uses a technique called the nuclear Overhouser effect to enhance sensitivity.  Trace amounts of heavy elements can impact how much enhancement you get from this effect.  I was lead author on a paper using NMR to rapidly determine solubility with hydrogen NMR.  We played some with using carbon 13 as with some molecules and solvents carbon 13 would be easier to use than hydrogen.  We found that there was simply too much variation from situation to situation to be able to reliably use carbon 13 and we were not after super accurate numbers.  We simply wanted a fast and cheap way to determine solubility of organics in several solvents to an accuracy of  +/- a few %.  Even proton NMR proved to be a problem is there was any significant amount of an element that had a nuclear quadrupole in the sample as that changed the proton relaxation time too much for quant results.  I think NMR can be part of the solution, but to make it the main required test simply does not strike me as reasonable and will result in passing fake honey and rejecting pure honey far too often to be acceptable.  That high rejection rate at the Apimondia show tells me there is a problem.  Everyone that entered knew there would be a testing program so was warned against cheating.  My bet is most of the samples that failed were not adulterated in any way. Some may have had too much water.  Last year at the local fair the judge rejected all submissions that had more than 16% water if I recall his magic number right.  Use a different meter and I suspect many he failed would have passed.  Or another meter and even more might fail.  Fast and cheap ain't generally very accurate.  We all know some honeys can be a real problem if they are too dry.  I had a couple of buckets a few years back that crystallized so fast I could not sell the honey.  I put it in a hot box and it liquified and looked great.  Then in a week at room temp it was crystallizing.  My solution was to add a cup of water to 50 pounds of honey and that solved the crystallization issue at least long enough I could sell it.

Is adulterated honey a business problem?  I am sure it is.  There are sugar sources lots cheaper than honey that can be fed to bees and after being processed by bees make it very hard to prove the product is not all from nectar or honeydew or plant sap.  Is the honey my bees make in early spring from broken maple branches dripping sap really honey?  After all the only significant sugar in maple sap is sucrose.  No pollen other than contamination from maple pollen.  No terpenes for aroma.  I am sure NMR would reject such honey.  Even nectar from flowers can vary greatly in trace components such as terpenes or alkaloids and sugars present.  The guy that wants to cheat is not dumb and will adapt as needed to beat the newest analytical methods.

Dick

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html