Tracking the origin of honey
By Leon Della Bosca, oY ur Life Choices
Sticky fingerprints DNA testing of Australian honey can reveal where it was produced and its main floral sources, according to research by Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and partners at the University of Melbourne and Curtin University.
R
ecently, my daughter asked me where honey comes from. “Bees make honey from flowers”, I replied. Then she asked, “How?”
Slightly flummoxed, I consulted the all-knowing oracle (Google) and quickly became versed in all things pollen and nectar sacs, and the process of nectar passing mouth-to-mouth until the moisture content changes it into honey. I then tried to explain that to a fouryear-old. Her response? “Do all flowers make nectar that makes honey?” A similar question was answered by researchers analysing the $100 million Australian honey industry, that exports 4500 tonnes annually. The findings,
they hope, could be used for a honey certification program to confirm the floral composition and provenance of commercial honey. CSIRO’s Dr Liz Milla says the technique works because honey contains DNA from the pollen collected by bees. ‘We tested 15 different honeys from across Australia and found most were dominated by eucalypts and related plants in the Myrtaceae family,’ Dr Milla says. “We detected the major floral source on the label in all commercially produced honeys. In 85 per cent of samples, they were found in the top five most abundant floral components. All the
honeys were composed of mixed florals, reflecting the diverse natural diets of honeybees. “We found that we could categorise most honeys according to Australia’s 89 geographically distinct bioregions from which they came,” she added. A technique called pollen DNA metabarcoding was used to identify plant species from their pollen by sequencing a short stretch of DNA and comparing it with a reference library. The libraries are built using reference DNA of plant specimens, curated by botanical experts at collections like the Australian National Herbarium. The DNA-based method is a fast and accurate way to identify the floral composition of Australian honey.
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September 2021
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