Composition of honeys from some important honey sources

Eva Crane and Penelope Walker

The Directory of important world honey sources, published  earlier this year, gives data on 452 nectar sources and 15 honeydew sources of honey. In addition to information on the plants and the nectar (or honeydew) and pollen from them, data on the physical properties and the chemical composition of the honeys were included where available. The chemical composition of honey in general has been reviewed by White. The present paper is concerned with 101 honeys for which the Directory gives the content of two or more constituents. All are from nectar plants; honeydew honeys will be discussed in a subsequent paper. The Directory should be consulted for  numerical results of individual chemical analyses, and for the publications from which they were taken. Many results were obtained by standard methods; however, some authors did not state their methods, and in some languages we were unable to ascertain them. A published chemical composition of certain honeys was omitted from the Directory if the samples were stated to have been aged or subjected to high temperatures, or to be granulated. In the literature there are reports of analyses of many other honey samples that are identified only by place of origin, and such honeys are, of course, not represented in the Directory. Nor are honeys from mixed sources, for example some of the many USA honeys analysed by White.