Determination of metabolite differences between loquat nectar and honey by UPLC-MS/MS

Honey is a widely consumed natural agricultural product due to its unique flavour, taste and its nutritional content. Honey bees form honey by collecting nectar from different flowers and then metabolising it to form honey which is stored in the hive. Currently attention is always focussed on the material composition of monofloral honeys from different plant sources. There is a lack of understanding of the differences in the transformation and composition of metabolites between plant nectar and the honey that is processed by bees after nectar feeding. In this study, loquat nectar and mature loquat honey were used for the detection of metabolites in both by Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography-Tandem mass spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS). The results showed that there was a significant difference in the relative content of non-volatile metabolites between the two. We detected a total of 914 non-volatile metabolites, of which 834 were detected in loquat nectar and 759 in loquat honey.