Aljedani 2017 — Heavy metals and elements in honeybees and honey from Saudi Arabia

Honeybee (Apis mellifera jemenatica) bodies and honey samples were collected from four agricultural regions of Saudi Arabia (Jazan, Asir, Al-Baha, Makkah) in March 2017 and analyzed for eight heavy metals (Cd, Cr, Cu, Fe, Mn, Ni, Pb, Zn) and four mineral elements (Ca, K, Mg, Na) by ICP-OES after dry-ashing. In honeybee tissue, Cd, Cr, Ni, and Pb were not detected (mean ± SD = 0.000 ± 0.000 mg/g) in any region; Fe was the dominant heavy metal (2.088–8.794 mg/g across regions). In honey, Cd, Mn, and Pb were not detected; Cr and Ni were quantified only in Al-Baha honey (Cr 0.1599 mg/L, Ni 0.037 mg/L); Fe was again the most concentrated heavy metal (0.907–1.904 mg/L). The author concludes that all measured values fell within international permissible limits for honey and bee products in Saudi Arabia, providing a low-contamination baseline for honey from agricultural regions distant from heavy industry.

Key numbers

Source: Table 1 (honeybee, mg/g) and Table 3 (honey, mg/L), pp. 4–5. All values are mean ± SD across n = 3 analytical replicates per region per matrix.

Honeybee tissue concentrations (mg/g, mean ± SD):

Honey concentrations (mg/L, mean ± SD):

Potassium was the most abundant mineral element in honey across all four regions (K range 5.590 mg/L Al-Baha to 35.873 mg/L Makkah). Calcium was the next most abundant (4.079–8.284 mg/L). Honeybee tissue mineral content was dominated by K (43.895 mg/g Al-Baha to 66.709 mg/g Jazan) followed by Ca (6.044–18.691 mg/g) and Mg (6.152–14.012 mg/g) (Table 1).

Note: The paper reports honeybee values in mg/g and honey values in mg/L; units are preserved as published. The paper does not specify whether honey values represent fresh-weight, dry-weight, or as-purchased basis, and the author does not state honey moisture content.

Methods (brief)

Honeybee workers and honey were collected from beehives in March 2017 in four agricultural regions of Saudi Arabia: Jazan (17°09’N 42°38’E), Asir (Abha; 18°13’24”N 42°30’26”E), Al-Baha (Al Mandaq; 20°0’0”N 41°30’0”E), and Makkah (Taif; 21°16’00”N 40°25’00”E). Honeybees were collected from the same cells from which honey was taken. Samples were stored in clean dry glass containers at 4 °C until analysis.

Sample preparation: 5 g of sample was burned to ash, then calcined for 13 h at 450 °C in a muffle furnace. Residual ash was dissolved in 10 mL 0.5 M HNO₃ and filtered through quantitative filter paper per US EPA (1983). Multi-element calibration standards (1000 ppm, Merck) were prepared per Mujic et al. (2011). Metal concentrations were measured by ICP-OES (Varian 720-ES). Method accuracy was verified against certified reference materials NIST-SRM 1515 (apple leaves) and INCY-TL-1 (tea leaves). Three analytical replicates per sample; means and standard deviations reported with the standard error tabulated separately (Tables 2 and 4).

The paper measures only total metal — no inorganic/total arsenic or methyl/total mercury speciation, no Cr-VI speciation. Arsenic and mercury are not in the analyte panel. The dry-ash digestion protocol at 450 °C carries known risk of volatilization losses for Cd, Hg, and Pb; the author does not report LOD/LOQ values, recovery percentages, or method validation against the certified reference materials. Reported ND values should be interpreted with this caveat: they are below the (unspecified) method detection limit, not confirmed absence.

Implications

Certification: The author concludes that all measured values fall within international permissible limits for honey and bee products in Saudi Arabia. Fe dominates both bee body burden and honey content in all four regions; the author attributes Fe burden to use of iron tools in beekeeping (wire foundation, sorting equipment) rather than to environmental Fe sources, citing related work on steel foundation wire in bee colonies. The contrast with mining-impacted honey corpora (e.g., the Ethiopian Kellem Wollega data) is informative for geographic stratification of honey occurrence distributions: Saudi agricultural honey from non-industrial regions reports Pb and Cd at non-detect in both bee body and honey matrices.

Courses: The dual-matrix design (bee body burden plus honey product concentration) is useful for teaching the distinction between exposure biomarker (bee tissue) and product contamination (honey as consumed by humans). The within-paper finding that Cr and Ni are present in Al-Baha honey but absent in Al-Baha bee tissue illustrates that bee tissue burden and honey content do not always track together; honey-borne metals can arise from post-collection processing or hive materials in addition to bee-mediated transfer from forage.

App: The ND values for Pb, Cd, Mn, and Ni in honey from these four Saudi agricultural regions represent a low-contamination baseline scenario. Because the dry-ash digestion at 450 °C may underreport volatile metals (Cd, Hg) and because the paper does not publish LOD/LOQ values, these NDs should not be treated as confirmed absences; they are below-detection findings with a sensitivity caveat.

Wiki pages updated on ingest

• honey
• lead
• cadmium
• nickel
• chromium
• iron
• copper
• manganese
• zinc

Verification notes

Merge-enhance pass 2026-05-20 (Claude Opus 4.7, autonomous ingest cycle; existing page updated: 2026-05-13 predated the 2026-05-14 schema cutoff):

• Corrected transposed Honey Cu Al-Baha value. Prior revision had Cu Al-Baha honey = “0.159 ± 0.000”. Verified against Table 3 (p. 5) of the source PDF: Cu Al-Baha honey is 0.000 ± 0.001 (effectively ND). The 0.159 value belongs to Cr Al-Baha honey (Table 3, Cr row; prose on p. 4 also gives 0.1599 with extra precision). The transposition matters because Cu in Al-Baha honey was the value mistakenly elevated; the corrected page now reports Cu Al-Baha as ND, consistent with the paper’s prose statement on p. 4 that “Heavy metals Cu was a region of Asir free of any pollution and not found in honey samples and the mean ± SD reached (0.000 ± 0.000) and the area of Jazan was found in the concentration (0.039 ± 0.001)” — i.e., Cu was effectively absent from Asir and Al-Baha honey, present only in Jazan and Makkah.
• Corrected Honeybee Mn Makkah value. Prior revision had 2.067 ± 0.018; Table 1 (p. 4) shows 2.066 ± 0.018. The paper’s narrative on p. 3 reports 2.0669 ± 0.018 (rounds to 2.067), creating a paper-internal precision discrepancy. Adopted Table 1 as authoritative since the table is the primary data presentation; the difference (2.066 vs 2.0669/2.067) is within rounding tolerance and does not affect interpretation.
• Corrected truncated raw_path. Prior raw_path ended at “Honeybee and H.pdf”; the actual filename is “Determination of Some Heavy Metals and Elements in Honeybee and Honey Samples from Saudi Arabia.pdf”. Fixed.
• Expanded Methods (brief) with the sampling locations (geographic coordinates as published), the digestion protocol (5 g, 450 °C, 13 h, 0.5 M HNO₃), the instrument (Varian 720-ES ICP-OES), and both certified reference materials (NIST-SRM 1515, INCY-TL-1) per Exception 2 of the brand firewall (instrument and reference-material naming is scientific reproducibility, not brand attribution).
• Added analytical caveat. The dry-ash digestion at 450 °C is known to volatilize Cd, Hg, and Pb; the paper does not publish LOD/LOQ values or recovery percentages. The ND reports for Pb and Cd in particular should be read as below-detection with a sensitivity caveat. This caveat now appears in both Methods (brief) and App-audience implications.
• Expanded ## Wiki pages updated on ingest to include all metals the paper measured at non-zero values (Cr, Fe, Cu, Mn, Zn) in addition to the previously listed Pb/Cd/Ni and the honey ingredient page.
• Corrected sample_population to clarify that n=3 refers to analytical replicates per region per matrix, not biological replicates; the paper does not state how many bees or hives contributed to each composited sample.
• Source ambiguity flagged, not perpetuated. The paper’s Sampling section (p. 2) reports “were collected 50 (mg/g) of bees and 20 (mg/L) of honey,” which are units of concentration rather than collection amounts and almost certainly an editorial error in the source. The previous revision repeated this phrasing; the corrected page omits this sentence as nonsensical and uses only the 5 g analytical sample weight stated in the Method section (p. 3), which is unambiguous.
• Internal precision discrepancy noted. Cr Al-Baha honey is reported as 0.1599 in the paper’s prose (p. 4) and as 0.159 in Table 3 (p. 5); the higher-precision prose value is shown in Key numbers, consistent with the prior revision.
• Preserved cite_key, raw_handle, license, access_url, sample_n, frontmatter slugs, and the overall page structure. No new ingredient, product, or regulation pages proposed; all metals referenced are in the current wiki/metals/ taxonomy.

2026-06-08 byte-identical filesystem-copy enhancement: added raw_sha256 (71bd6c3131c0ef4a160e3c26afc45f57cf8a3a83c8ac00c0b36ed3013c4a692f) and a duplicate_filesystem_copies block recording a second filesystem location of the canonical PDF at raw/Manual Fetch Kimi /June 8/Kimi_Agent_Download Corruption Issue/_extracted_07_Processed_Foods_Snacks_Beverages/07_Processed_Foods_Snacks_Beverages/Determination of Some Heavy Metals and Elements in Honeybee and Honey Samples from Saudi Arabia.pdf. Verified byte-identical via shasum -a 256 against the canonical raw_path copy. Surfaced via the June 8 re-extraction batch placing the paper a second time under the processed-foods/snacks/beverages subfolder of the corruption-issue tree. Both filesystem locations now resolve to this canonical source page so future manual-fetch identity-check cycles in the June 8 batch skip re-ingest. No claim, value, slug, exposure number, key-numbers, or HMTc-firewall change. Metadata-only enhancement; no new audit cycle spawned per 2026-06-02 precedent (no body or evidence-bearing frontmatter changed).

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.