Pesticide and trace element residues in honey and beeswax combs from Israel in association with human risk assessment and honey adulteration.

Beehive products are considered sentinels for environmental pollutants. The presence of trace elements and pesticides in honey and beeswax may pose a health hazard to consumers. The study's aim was to determine the profile of pesticides and trace elements in Israeli honey and beeswax samples in relation to human risk assessment. At least two pesticides contaminated the honey and beeswax samples simultaneously, in which, amitraz metabolites and coumaphos were frequently detected. The neonicotinoid insecticides and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, were found only in honey samples, whereas the more lipophilic pesticides were predominantly found in beeswax. In honey, chromium displayed the highest mean concentration, followed by zinc, whereas lead and molybdene occurred only in beeswax. Our findings indicate that the daily consumption of honey and beeswax together may compromise children's health. Sucrose-syrup fed honey could not be distinguished from floral honey based on sugar profile, rather by its trace elements levels.

Authentication of beeswax (Apis mellifera) by high-temperature gas chromatography and chemometric analysis.

Chemical characterization and authentication of beeswax of Apis mellifera was performed by high temperature capillary gas chromatography coupled to electron impact mass spectrometry or to flame ionisation detection and chemometric analysis. Many major components (>50) of beeswax, odd and even hydrocarbons, oleofin, palmitate, oleate and hydroxypalmitate monoesters were detected, and for the first time palmitate and oleate monoesters esterified with 1-octadecanol and 1-eicosanol are reported to be present in beeswax. Unsupervised pattern recognition procedures, cluster analysis and principal component analysis, were used to find data patterns and successfully differentiate authentic and paraffin adulterated beeswax based on the chemical profile obtained. Independent assessment of beeswax quality and performance of the unsupervised classification methods were performed using classical analytical parameters. The discrimination power of the chemometric unsupervised methods for detection of paraffin adulterated beeswax was superior to the discriminating power of classical analytical parameters. Using linear discriminant analysis, classification rules for authentic and paraffin adulterated beeswax samples were developed. The model was validated by leave-one-out cross validation and showed good recognition and prediction abilities, 100% and 99%, respectively.

Characterization of wax as a potential diffraction intensity standard for macromolecular crystallography beamlines.

A number of commercially available waxes in the form of thin disc samples have been investigated as possible diffraction intensity standards for macromolecular crystallography synchrotron beamlines. Synchrotron X-ray powder diffraction measurements show that beeswax offers the best performance of these waxes owing to its polycrystallinity. Crystallographic lattice parameters and diffraction intensities were examined between 281 and 309 K, and show stable and predictable thermal behaviour. Using an X-ray beam of known incident flux at lambda = 1 A, the diffraction power of two strong Bragg reflections for beeswax were quantified as a function of sample thickness and normalized to 10(10) photons s(-1). To demonstrate its feasibility as a diffraction intensity standard, test measurements were then performed on a new third-generation macromolecular crystallography synchrotron beamline.

Determination of the relative linear collision stopping power and linear scattering power of electron bolus material.

The linear collision stopping power and linear scattering power for machineable wax relative to water have been determined for electron energies between 2 and 20 MeV. Knowledge of these quantities is necessary for the use of this wax as bolus in electron pencil-beam dose algorithms. The atomic composition of the wax (rho = 0.920 +/- 0.001 g cm(-3)) was obtained by having the wax assayed. The formalisms expressed in the ICRU Report 35 were used to calculate the relative linear collision stopping and linear scattering powers of the wax. The calculated relative linear collision stopping powers of 2 to 20 MeV electrons in the wax ranged from 0.949 +/- 0.005 to 0.952 +/- 0.005, and the calculated relative linear scattering powers ranged from 0.734 +/- 0.004 to 0.729 +/- 0.004. As a check of the calculation method, the relative linear collision stopping power was measured by determining the shift in electron central-axis depth-ionization curves when varying thicknesses of water were replaced by wax. These measurements, made using 10, 12, 15 and 18 MeV electron beams with wax thicknesses from 1.0 - 4.0 cm, resulted in a mean value of 0.931 +/- 0.008. Determination of the relative linear stopping power and the linear scattering power by using the measured CT number to extract values from patient data tables resulted in values of 0.933 +/- 0.009 and 0.746 +/- 0.016, respectively, indicating that it should be acceptable to use the Hounsfield values obtained with CT scans for treatment planning dose calculations.