Study Examines Antioxidant Activity of Australian Stingless Bee Honey

Composition and Antioxidant Activity of Trigona carbonaria Honey from Australia
Journal of Medicinal Food, November 11, 2008

Stingless bees (Tribe Meliponini) are a diverse group of highly eusocial bees distributed throughout the tropics and subtropics. Trigona carbonaria honey, from Australia, was characterized by traditional physicochemical parameters (acidity, sugars, diastase, electrical conductivity, hydroxymethylfurfural, invertase, nitrogen, and water content) and other compositional factors (flavonoids, polyphenols, organic acids, and water activity), as well as total antioxidant capacity and radical scavenging activity.

For the Australian T. carbonaria, the traditional analytical parameters were similar to those previously reported for neotropical stingless bee honey and confirm that honeys produced by Meliponini bees possess several physicochemical properties that are distinctly different from Apis mellifera honey…

The antioxidant activity can represent an important added value for T. carbonaria honey, to initiate a medicinal approach for both nutritional and pharmaceutical applications, besides further physicochemical characterization.