Plants: Sources of Diversity in Propolis and Honey Properties

Dear Colleagues,

Plants are the main food source for bees. The insects also pollinate the plants, which are reliant on them for fertilization. Social insects such as honeybees (Apis mellifera) depend on the plant source for producing some of their products. Bee products are divided in two major classes: those that need raw materials outside the hive (nectar, pollen, resins), which the bees mix with their own substances to produce honey, propolis or bee pollen, and those that are entirely products of bee secretions (royal jelly, wax, bee venom). Propolis is produced by honeybees by mixing different plant resins with their own substances, including wax produced by their glands. Further, tree buds, sap flows, leaves, branches, and barks of plants are used by bees to produce propolis. Propolis is a very complex matrix, consisting mainly of resins and volatiles from plants and beeswax. The high content of secondary metabolites from plants determines the biological activity of propolis. Honey is produced by bees from plant nectars or other sweet substances which the bees collect and transform, by adding their own substances and depositing them in the hive for maturation. Floral honey has as its main raw material the nectar produced by the nectary glands of flowers, and honeydew honey comes from the sweet substances collected by bees from the leaves of tree branches, or directly from plant sap. The nutritional value as well as the biological activity of honey are directly connected to the plant source of the nectar and implicitly by the secondary metabolites contained. Honey and propolis are important products depending greatly on plant biodiversity. Following the success of the first volume of the Special Issue of Plants on “Plants: Source of Diversity in Propolis Properties”, in which nine papers were published, all with a considerable number of citations and one of them being a highly cited paper in the field, we have decided to launch the second volume of this Special issue. This time, we will enlarge the scope of the issue with another important bee product—honey—which we believe will add more value to the topic. Studies on the plant origin of honey and propolis are encouraged, as are review articles on the botanical origin of different honey and propolis types.  

For this Special Issue, we invite investigators and scholars to submit original articles, review articles, and short communications on the mentioned topics: monofloral, multifloral, and honeydew honey, chemical composition of honey and propolis, bioactivity of honey and propolis, and most of all, applications connected to plant source and geographical origin.

Dr. Otilia Bobis
Guest Editor

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