Determination and Analysis of Fake Honey and Stingless Bee Honey

Abstract

Recently, there has been a report in local newspaper about fake honey that had been widespread sold in the market. There are several types of honey that been adulterated especially the stingless bee honey, since the high demand from consumer and its nutritional and benefits to health. Besides that, the production of stingless bee honey itself is 50 times less than regular honey bees. Thus, the production of fake honey with addition of sugar that been adulterated to pure honey was out of control solely to make an extra buck. In this study, the sample used were pure stingless bee honey from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) farm, local honey products as a sample and sugar from market. The local honey samples were analyzed of their sucrose and made compared with laboratory prepared sucrose from sugar and pure stingless bee honey. Determination and analysis of pure stingless bee honey and fake honey also sugar sample was carried out using Fourier Transform Infrared Attenuated Total Reflectance (FTIR-ATR) Spectroscopy, Ultra Violet-Visible (UV-Vis) Spectroscopy and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy. Qualitative analysis of pure, samples of stingless bee honey and sucrose using FTIR-ATR showed difference between pure honey, sample of honey and sugar at the band from about 1400 to 750 cm-1 corresponds to the most sensitive absorption region of the honey sugars. Moreover, the honey sample was suspected to contain sucrose and this supported by the analysis using UV-Vis that showed peak at 280 nm to represent sucrose. Meanwhile, the analysis by using NMR spectroscopy shown the differences at chemical shift 4.2 to 3.0 ppm. The study show local honey sample contains of sucrose.