Bibliographical review of the main European unifloral honeys

Abstract

The International Honey Commission of Apimondia (IHC) carried out a large work of characterization resulting in the descriptive sheets of 15 important European unifloral honey (Persano Oddo and Piro, 2004). To compare the results obtained in IHC work with other European studies, an extensive bibliographic review was performed, collecting and tabulating the analytical data available in the literature related to the same honey types and analytical parameters reported in the descriptive sheets. Also some further unpublished data personally communicated by authors were included. A summarising table was compiled for each of the 15 important European honey types. All data reported in the tables are generally the same as found in the original works. In some cases the original measure units were transformed to the official ones (Bogdanov et al., 1997), so that they can be compared to the data of the descriptive sheets (e.g. electrical conductivity in mS/cm, invertase in U/kg, etc.). The complete references quoted in the review are listed in the reference list. The distribution of the studies per country is reported in Table I. The results of the IHC study (Persano Oddo and Piro, 2004) are fairly consistent with those available in the literature. When some major differences are encountered, they are probably accounted for by the different analytical methods used. The review provides a useful device for the knowledge and study of unifloral honeys.