20 Food analytics and services
Which plant is in my honey?
NGS Metabarcoding for honey
Authors: Dr. Siria Biagioni (Project Manager), Dr. Kamaleddin Alizadeh (Data Scientist),
Dr. Ghalia Kassen (Head of Microscopy Department), Quality Services International GmbH/
Tentamus Center for Food Fraud (TCF²), Bremen, Germany
Curiosity and interest around
what makes such a high variety
of honey is as old as beekeeping
itself. Which nectar source
produces this wonderful gold crystals or
that delicate liquid almost-transparent
honey? For centuries, scientists, beekeepers
and amateurs alike have been monitoring
honeybees, reporting, collecting,
describing and sharing their knowledge
on plants visitations, in order to try to
answer these questions.
It was only late in the XIX century
that somebody came up with an original
idea. In 1895, Rudolph Pfister demonstrated
the possibility of determining the
honey origin by studying something very
small and very specialized, the pollen
grains, male microgametophytes of seed
plants 1. More years passed and more evidence
accumulated on the validity of the
method, until Lennart Von Post, regarded
as the father of the discipline called palynology,
made it formal 3. After the first
pioneer studies pollen grains are now
used routinely to investigate the botanical
origin of honey, in what is known as
the discipline of melissopalynology 4.
The use of pollen microscopic analysis
to determine the origin of honey,
to describe and quantify the plants collected
by honeybees, open a new era.
For decades, melissopalynologists have
been working on honey samples from all
around the world, publishing and sharing
knowledge on what they could observe,
identify and quantify in the microscope.
Nowadays, melissopalynology is considered
as one of the highly specialized
fields within an already atypical disci-
Fig.1: Old illustrations of pollen grains from German pharmacist and chemist
Carl Julius Fritzsche2