###### Abstract  
The higher demand for honey from consumers, combined with its limited availability, has led to different types of honey adulteration, causing substantial economic as well as negative impacts on consumers' nutrition and health. Therefore, a need has emerged for reliable and cost-effective quality control methods to detect honey adulteration to ensure both the safety and quality of honey. To simulate the process with those applied by beekeepers in real-time, bee colonies were fed with different types of bee feeding (sugar syrup, candy paste and commercial syrup). The produced samples were analyzed for their carbohydrate profile and their invertase activity with the aim to find the effects of bee feeding on the quality of the final product. Honey samples produced after feeding with commercial syrup presented low fructose (22.9 %) and glucose (31.7 %) concentrations and high content of maltose (20.1%), while the samples that came from bee feeding with sugar syrup and candy paste had high concentrations of sucrose (6.2 % and 3.2 %, respectively), exceeding in some cases the legislative limits. Moreover, the samples coming from sugar feeding had lower values of invertase activity, while the group with inverted syrup was clearly discriminated through multi-discriminant analysis. The invertase activity of control samples was found at 153.7 U/kg, which was significantly higher compared to the other groups. The results showed that bee feeding during honey production might lead to adulteration, which can be detected through routine analyses, including the carbohydrate profile and the invertase activity. bee feeding; syrup; honey adulteration; carbohydrate profile; HPLC; invertase activity +
Footnote †: journal: _sciences_  
syrups of high-fructose corn, glucose, sugar beet or cane sugar and inverted sugar, is the most common adulteration practice [2,8,9], with the use of inverted sugars remaining high in the preferences of beekeepers. They usually feed their colonies during the blooming season to pursue higher yield production per hive. In this case, this practice may affect the quality of the final product, resulting in the production of adulterated honey. Thus, during the blooming season, any artificial sugar feeding of bee colonies producing honey is unacceptable and is forbidden. To detect possible adulteration of honey, additionally to microscopic analysis [10], various physicochemical parameters such as proline concentration, 13C/12C isotope analysis and laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) have also been used, while the investigation of the antimicrobial activity of honey has been proposed as a new qualitative parameter [2,5,9,11,12,13]. Because some of these methods require high technology equipment and are generally not economical, there is a need to develop more practical and less costly methods to detect honey adulteration. Given that the sugar composition of honey is affected by beekeeping treatments [14,15], apart from its botanical or geographical origin [16, 17, 18], honey's carbohydrate profile could also be a useful tool for the determination of its quality and the detection of its adulteration. Various methods for sugar profile analysis are proposed in the literature to determine honey quality [4,14,19,20]. Mainly, high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) or gas chromatography (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry -GC-MS) is applied [21,22], while nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has recently been used [23]. In addition, the multivariate statistical approach has shown promising results regarding distinguishing between adulterated and non-adulterated honey [3,20]. According to the present literature, samplings come mostly from admixtures of non-adulterated honey with different types of syrup in laboratory tests [3] and not from feeding experiments in the field.