# Antioxidant Capacity of Honey Enriched by Wildflowers
## 1 Introduction  
Honey is a natural substance produced by honeybees (Apis mellifera) from the nectar of flowers, which is a sweet, flavourful, and viscose liquid. This unique product is highly saturated in sugars containing primarily mono- and disaccharides, such us glucose, fructose, and saccharose, the percentage of which reaches approximately 80% [1]. In addition to the ingredients, such as amino acids, minerals, vitamins, or bioactive substances, honey also contains about 14-20% water, which is an important indicator of the stability of honey [2]. Additionally, it contains a plethora of compounds with various effects, including antioxidants, which, despite occurring in small amounts in honey, have demonstrated their valuable health-promoting potential, which was already well known in antiquity. The nutritional and medicinal properties of honey are derived specifically from the presence ofthese antioxidants, both enzymatic and non-enzymatic [3]. The former include catalase and glutathione peroxidase [4]. Non-enzymatic antioxidants include flavonoids, non-aromatic organic acids, phenolic acids and their esters, free amino acids, mainly proline, and some vitamins and carotenoid derivatives [5; 6; 7]. Natural honey's concentration of phenolic compounds that exhibit antimicrobial and antioxidant properties can exceed 250 ug-g-1 [8]. The quality of honey, and especially its composition, depends on several environmental factors during production, such as the weather and the humidity inside the hive, the nectar conditions, and the treatment of the honey during extraction and storage, but primarily depends on the feeding of the bees [9]. The high health, dietary, and technological value of honey, as well as the growing demand for honey in modern times, combined with the high dependence on honey quality and its chemical composition being based on a number of factors [10; 11; 12], have led to the emergence of a new product--herbal honey, which is designed by beekeepers and \"tailored\" by the honeybees. Herbal honey is a honey-like product, produced indirectly by bees fed by the beekeeper with a syrup containing mainly saccharose enriched with herbal extracts or fruit juices [6; 13]. A comparative study of three natural honey varieties and five herbal honey types demonstrated that herbal honey were characterised by a higher antioxidative capacity than natural honey. Furthermore, herbal honey with nettles had the highest antibacterial capacity [14; 15]. The antimicrobial effect of herbal honey against microorganisms, except _E. coli_, was confirmed by a study by [PERSON] et al. [16]. However, herbal honey are generally characterised by higher saccharose content than that permitted for natural honeys [14]. Despite the proven benefits of herbal honey, from a clinical standpoint, it is definitely recommended to use only natural honeys, which are only minimally processed to aid in maintaining their natural spectrum of biological activity [17]. Therefore, in order to improve the antioxidative capabilities of beekeeping products rather than produce herbal honeys, it appears that a better solution is to enrich natural honey with plant extracts or ground-dried medicinal plants for which honey can become a natural and tasty carrier highly acceptable to consumers, often suppressing the not very pleasant taste of health-promoting additives, such as herbs or algae [18]. Honey with various additives has become an innovative product with diversified sensory and health properties, which has expanded the range of bee products on the market and given them a new meaning, not only in terms of consumption but also in marketing, because honey with attractive additives in terms of colour and taste and that is aesthetically packaged has been sold to customers who were not even supporters of pure honey. Due to the wide variety of additives and the constantly growing customer interest in the product, it has also become the subject of research.