Assessing the quality of royal jelly purchased in Turkey

Although the consumption of royal jelly has been rapidly increase in recent years, there is a lack of knowledge about the quality of royal jelly purchased in Turkey. In order to evaluate quality properties, a total of thirteen different royal jelly samples, consisting of 12 commercial samples, and 1 sample of known origin obtained from freshly harvested from University of Akdeniz Department of Zootechny bee colonies were analyzed for water, crude protein, acidity, pH, ash, total sugar, fructose, glucose, sucrose and 10-HDA content. There were significant differences between the royal jelly samples with regard to all of the chemical properties determined in this work (P<0.01). Water, crude protein, ash, total sugar and 10-HDA content of the 13 royal jelly samples varied from 63.10 to 73.55 %, 9.76 to 12.57 %, 0.92 to 1.17 %, 7.68 to 11.66 % and 0.57 to 3.11 %, respectively. Comparison of the 10-HDA values measured in this study with the currently available Turkish royal jelly standard showed that 6 of the 13 royal jelly samples had lower values than the allowed Turkish limit of 1.4 %.KEY WORDS: Honeybee, royal jelly, chemical composition, quality control