# Physicochemical and Antioxidant Properties of Selected Polish and Slovak Honeys
## 1 Introduction  
Honey is well known all over the world as a natural sweet substance produced from the nectar of flowers or secretions of plants and plant-sucking insects mainly by bee's genus _Apis mellifera_ and by wild bees (stingless bees, or _Meliponinae_) [1]. Honey composition is complex, containing primarily sugars such as fructose and glucose, along with proteins, enzymes, amino acids, mineral salts, vitamins, and a variety of bioactive compounds, including polyphenols and flavonoids. These constituents contribute to honey's health-promoting properties, especially its antioxidant capacity [2]. It should be noted, that according to recent observations, antioxidant compounds, and in particular polyphenols, may have an ambivalent nature and act as both anti- and pro-oxidant factors in living organisms [3]. The physicochemical properties, chemical composition of honey depends on many factors regarding to floral origin of nectar [4]. Monosaccharides--fructose and glucose--constitutes main components of honey. In some cases, different types of honey exhibit diversified proportions of those two main carbohydrates, though other sugars are also present in lesser extend [5]. Honey is a very complex system and can be considered as valuable source of antioxidants [6]. Large set of antioxidants can interact and contribute to the biological value of honey. It contains caffe, coumaric acid as well as their esters, phenolic acids and flavonoid aglycones, carotenoids and ascorbic acid [7]. Antioxidant activities of honey are significantly influenced by factors such as botanical and geographical origin, or environmental conditions. For example, dark-colored honeys, like buckwheat honey, revealed higher phenolic content and antioxidant properties compared to brighter types [2,8]. Poland and Slovakia, with their rich biodiversity and traditional beekeeping practices, produce a variety of honeys with distinct characteristics. Polish honeys have been identified as valuable sources of antioxidants, with studies showing significant variations in antioxidant activity and phenolic content among different types [9]. In honey samples obtained from Slovakia, analyses have demonstrated notable antioxidant and antimicrobial activities, underscoring the potential health benefits of these natural products [10]. Although concentration of major honey components like carbohydrates is more or less similar in many types of honey, some minor components can be useful for differentiation of same specific types of this product. Electrical conductivity is the most common parameter used to distinguish nectar honey and multifocal honey from honeybee honey [11]. Moreover, analysis of other minor ingredients like amino acids, carboxylic acids, polyphenols, and flavonoids can help in honey type determination [6,12,13]. However, identification of all kinds of honey on the basis of physicochemical features is still difficult and therefore, statistical approach like chemometric analysis is often applied for better interpretation of obtained data [7,14-16]. Cluster analysis is an important tool in exploratory data analysis, enabling the detection of structure in datasets without the need to apply previous assumptions about the membership of objects in specific groups. It is widely used in many fields of science, supporting decision-making and discovering hidden patterns in complex datasets. Its main goal is to group the studied objects into subsets, called clusters, so that elements belonging to one group show maximum similarity to each other, and at the same time differ significantly from elements belonging to other groups. The key principle used in this method is the rule of within-cluster similarity as well as between-cluster dissimilarity. This means that elements within one cluster should be characterized by a high degree of similarity, while the differences between individual clusters should be as clear as possible [17].