Honey profiling by 1H‑NMR spectroscopy
To characterize the compounds and properties of our honey samples, we used H1 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy (hereafter H1-NMR spectroscopy), a state-of-the-art analytical technique increasingly used alongside chemometrics statistical approaches for the qualitative and quantitative control of honeys, as well as to assess the botanical origin of honeys and to quantify their major constituting compounds (Schievano et al., 2012; Ohmenhaeuser et al., 2013). H1-NMR spectroscopy was carried out on all 240 samples described above at the laboratories of Quality Services International GmbH (QSI, Bremen, Germany) following the method described in Noiset et al, 2022. We quantified 36 compounds grouped in five categories : sugars (n=10), organic acids (n=3), amino acids (n=8), fermentation markers (i.e., all the compounds involved in sugar transformation trough alcoholic, acetic and lactic fermentation; n=10) and anti-microbial compounds (n=5) (Supplementary Table 3).
Another set of physicochemical data of honey samples of Apis mellifera (n = 10) from Mexico analysed according to the protocol described previously at the QSI laboratories were pooled with our dataset of 90 Apis spp. samples; this provided a better balance between the number of honey bee and stingless bee samples analysed in this study.