>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.

This is a great suggestion but unfortunately I won't be able to backtrack to the original samples in a way that I would trust. I'm debating with myself whether we'll do another round of this testing in 2021; in that case we would have much stricter controls on how we sample (and many other factors, as informed by my reading).

>advised us (some not too politely) that it was anywhere from 70
to 90% canola.  One German company was sure that worse yet it, was from
Rapeseed. There hadn't been enough Canola plants available to those
hives to produce 5% of that honey.  We finally moved it in June (still
mostly liquid) to a Canadian packer in Vancouver, who looked at, tasted
it and packed it as Pure Clover; some of the best, he said, he'd ever
seen.  That was my lesson as to how accurate pollen testing was (not)
for determining nectar source

I am convinced that presence of pollen alone is not evidence of a honey's botanical origin, but I fail to see how this Canadian packer's opinion was diagnostic? It agrees with your assumption that it was clover but relying on person's taste test does not seem very reliable.

Thanks again, this is all good food for thought. I originally envisioned this being a multi-year project; identifying the inherent limitations of the data and brainstorming on some potential ways we can improve the quality of that data going forward is very useful.

thanks
Scott
Johnston RI

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