Characterization of honey from the Canary Islands: determination of the mineral content by atomic absorption spectrophotometry

In this work, different types of honey produced in the Canary Islands were characterized on the basis of their mineral contents. Overall, 10 metals were determined in 116 samples, 81 of which were from the Canaries and 35 from various other places. Iron, copper, zinc, magnesium, calcium and strontium were determined by atomic absorption spectrophotometry, and potassium, sodium, lithium and rubidium by atomic emission spectrophotometry. A flow injection manifold was employed to analyse those samples requiring dilution. The chemometric processing of the spectroscopic results by various techniques (including principal component analysis, cluster analysis, discriminant analysis and logistic regression) allowed the accurate classification of the honey samples according to origin.