New from the front, now people are trying classify honey as to whether it's produced by native honey bees or not.

the following excerpt is quoted for review purposes only.

Honey is considered a product very prone to suffer economically motivated adulterations.
While several works focused on the detection of frauds related to honey’s botanical/and or
geographical origin, only scarce work is available regarding its entomological origin. In this
work, two DNA-based approaches are proposed to authenticate the entomological of
European honeys, targeting the mitochondrial genes cytb and COI. A cytb subspecies-
specific PCR assay was developed for the identification of A. m. iberiensis honeybees
belonging to the A lineage (Portugal and Spain), being successfully validated with honeys of
known entomological origin and applied to the authentication of commercial honeys. From
20 commercial honeys, 5 Portuguese and Spanish samples were confirmed as being from A-
lineage A. m. iberiensis honeybees. To differentiate honeybees from A. mellifera of C and M
lineages, a second method was proposed based on real-time PCR coupled to HRM targeting
the COI gene. Similarly, the method was validated with authenticated honeys and applied to
differentiate C (A. m. ligustica and A. m. carnica) and M (A. m. iberiensis and A. m. mellifera)
lineage honeybees in commercial samples from different European countries. Most of the
analysed samples (13 out of 15) were identified as being from C-lineage honeybees. As
expected, honeys from Italy and Croatia were identified as C-lineage honeybees since A. m.
ligustica and A. m. carnica are native from these countries. However, in countries such as
France, Denmark and Sweden where A. m. mellifera M-lineage are native, the honeys were
also identified as being from C lineage. This finding highlight the preference of honey
beekeepers for C lineage instead of their native M lineage honeybees, endangering the
autochthonous subspecies A. m. mellifera.

Soares, S., Grazina, L., Mafra, I., Costa, J., Pinto, M.A., Beatriz, M., Oliveira, P.P., Amaral, J.S., Towards honey authentication: differentiation of Apis mellifera subspecies in European honeys based on mitochondrial DNA markers, Food Chemistry (2019), doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodchem.2018.12.119

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