Adulterated stingless bee honey identification using vis-nir spectroscopy technique

Abstract

The objective of this study was to study the ability of the VIS-NIR spectroscopy to classify the pure and adulterated stingless bee honey across the wavelength range of 450– 969 nm using an optical spectrometer. The physicochemical properties such as soluble solid content (SSC) and moisture content (refractive index, RI) of pure and adulterated honey has also been investigated using a refractometer. The result showed that pure stingless bee honey has the highest transmittance rate, SSC and RI value compared to adulterated honey. There are significant differences (P < 0.0001) in the transmittance rate, SSC and RI of stingless bee honey over five different types of treatments. The results also showed that VIS-NIR data were good in classifying the samples into different treatments with 99.33% accuracy rate. About thirty-four wavelengths were found to be the most significant to discriminate the different treatments by principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) techniques.