Nutritional Analysis of Stingless and Stinging Bee Honey by Spectroscopic Methods

Abstract

Honey has been used as both sweetener and medicine since ancient times. Recently, there has been a report regarding stingless bee honey where it is twice as nutritious as stinging bee honey. Besides that, according to Food Act the percentage of sucrose in honey should be less than 10%. In this study, samples of melted sugar, stingless and stinging bee honey were collected and analyzed using Fourier Transform Infrared Attenuated Total Reflectance (FTIR-ATR) spectroscopy, Ultraviolet-Visible (UV-Vis) spectroscopy and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Qualitative analysis of stingless and stinging bee honey by FTIR-ATR showed differences at the band of 1175 cm-1 to 1700 cm-1 indicating lesser intensity than sugar. Intensity is affected by analyte concentration which proves that sugar contains higher concentration of sucrose. Moreover, sugar showed the highest absorbance of 0.307 at 278 nm which is supported by the analysis using UV-Vis to represent sucrose. Sucrose is made up of glucose and fructose. The analysis of NMR spectroscopy showed sugar having strong signal at 5.2 ppm indicating glucose which is absent in both honey samples. Meanwhile, fructose is present in stingless bee honey at 4.1 ppm while absent in stinging bee honey. The study shows that stingless bee honey is more nutritious than stinging bee honey in terms of sucrose content.