Developing European standards for bee pollen and royal jelly: quality, safety and authenticity.
APIFRESH
APIFRESH Facts and Figures • Budget: 2 M. Euro. • Project Coordinator: Inspiralia • Project Participants: 10 partners from 6 different countries. • Duration: 3 Years. • Status: 15 Months. • Web: www.apifresh.eu • tomas.rodriguez@itav.es
Partners List Number *
Beneficiary name
Short name
Type
ITAV
RTD
EPBA
AG-SME
Orszagos Magyar Meheszeti Egyesulet
OMME
AG-SME
4
Federacao Nacional dos Apicultores de Portugal
FNAP
AG-SME
5
Centro Tecnol贸gico Nacional de la Conserva y la Alimentaci贸n
CTC
AG-SME
6
MIEL
SME-OTH
7
Campomiel Balparmak
BALPARMAK
SME-OTH
8
Parco Tecnologico Padano
PTP
SME-OTH
Centro Agricola Regional Marchamalo
CAR
RTD
TUBITAK
RTD
1 Tecnolog铆as Avanzadas Inspiralia S.L. (coordinator) 2 European Professional Beekeepers Association 3
9 10
T眉bitak Marmara Research Center
Why Beekeeping is Important • Beekeeping offers employment to thousands of people all over the world. In many places this is the only job option available. • Bee products are used in: • Food industry. • Cosmetics. • Medicine. • Bee products are high quality food with important healthy properties aimed at: • Healthy living • Nutritional equilibrium • Illnesses prevention. • European beekeeping sector is valued €400M Euro. • Certain chemical compounds, only found in bee products, offer the promise of improving important illnesses; such as cancer. • Agriculture, as we know it today, could not survive without bees. It is estimated at least 40% of pollination is done by bees. • Beekeeping is an endangered profession.
Why APIFRESH is needed The European Beekeeping Sector is struggling to survive due to: • Very intensive man power required. • Hard profession. New generations are not interested in beekeeping despite the positive image beekeepers have in the society. • Fierce competition from lower quality / lower price products from abroad. • Poor development of high value products such as Bee Pollen and Royal Jelly. • Lack of scientific support backing the claimed healthy properties of bee products. • Poor beekeeping practices. • Adulteration of European products. • No regulations exist on Bee Pollen and Royal Jelly resulting in unfair competition.
How APIFRESH can Help • By determining the chemical, physical, microbiologic and sensory properties characterizing European bee pollen and royal jelly with the aim to identify the quality and health enhancing compounds present in European bee products. • By understanding how PCR techniques can be used for anti-fraud detection • By exploring how image analysis techniques can be used to determine origin of bee pollen and royal jelly. • By providing Good Practice Guidelines for harvesting, storage, transportation and preservation of bee products. • By providing the Scientific background necessary to support the claimed healthy properties of European bee products.
Technological Objectives • Develop methodologies to create European quality standards for pollen and royal jelly. Including: analytical methods to determine sensory properties (odour, taste, and visible contaminants), bacterial load, water content, chemical composition (fat, proteins, carbohydrates, etc.) pesticides and heavy metals. • Identification of bio-active and other health enhancing compounds. Through techniques for measuring: bio-active components, antioxidants, sterols, flavonoids, polyphenols, etc. • Develop low-cost decision support system for the identification of pollen vegetal species, relative proportions and geographical origin By applying machine learning techniques on the image data. • Setting-up a methodology for the determination of pollen authenticity and the creation of a database with genetic information. Through PCR technique
Project Results
• Quality standards for pollen and royal jelly. • Anti-fraud PCR methodology. • DSS. Decision support system for pollen and royal jelly authentication. • Guidelines for pollen and royal jelly harvesting, collection, packaging, transportation and storage. • Manual of nutritive / healthy compounds.
Analise the Market Situation
How we are doing it...
Produce Sample Collection Guidelines
Create Images Database
Collect Samples
Develop Computer Vision SW
PCR Analysis
Physi-Chemical Analysis
Decision Support System
Good Practice Guidleines
Report On Healthy Propeties
Proposal for New Bee Pollen and Royal Jelly Standard
Conferences • Apitherapie Kongress, Passau. 25-26/03/2011. • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Süddeutscher Berufs und Erwerbs Imkertage. Donaueschingen. Soltauer Großimkertag. 15-16/01/2011. EPBA, General Membership Meeting. Strasbourg. 06-08/03/2011. Technical workshop on beekeeping. La Rioja. 16/30/2011. XXX International Beekeeping Fair. Pastrana, Spain. 10-13/03/2011. Operations Research and Industrial Engineering 30th National Congress Apimondia First World Conference on Organic Beekeeping. 27 – 29 August 2nd İnternational Muğla Beekeeping & Pine Honey Congress. 6th COLOSS Conference Prevention of Honeybee Colony Losses. 4th EurBee Congress. 7-9 September 2010. METU, Ankara, Turkey. 4th Marmara Beekeeping Congress. 2-3-4 December 2010. 3rd International Apimondia Forum on Apitherapy and the 2nd International Forum on Apiquality. September 28 – October 2, 2010. Ljubljana, Slovenia. The International Food Congress entitled "Novel Approaches in Food Industry First World Beekeeping Day Gold Rain Festival. 28-may-10. Hacettepe Biotechnology and Food Industry Conference. Ankara, Turkey. ISO, Create a standard meeting of royal jelly. Saint Denis / AFNOR,
Workshops • The project organized a workshop at Centro Agrario Marchamalo on the 29th of July 2010. The following personalities attended the workshop: • The event was broadcasted by the Regional TV of Castilla La Mancha. The event was also published in a number of regional news papers. • Presentation of APIFRESH at TUBITAK MRC Project monitoring Meeting (20 October 2010), Gebze-KOCAELİ, (participants: President and Vice presidents of TUBITAK MRC, Directors of TUBITAK MRC Institutes, Business development Authorities of TUBITAK MRC. • Presentation of APIFRESH by Ozlem ASLAN at TUBITAK MRC Project monitoring Meeting (24 May 2011), • Presentation of APIFRESH via TUBITAK MRC web site • Introduction of APIFRESH in presentation of TUBITAK MRC Food Institute which took place in training activities, workshops, etc. during the whole year. • Queens Course organized by the organizations responsible for health defence in La Rioja. • The APIFRESH Project was presented at workshops celebrated in “Parque del Garraf”. Barcelona.
Thank You For your Attention tomas.rodriguez@pera.com