Dried Vs Fresh-Frozen Bee Pollen: Botanical Sensory Profiling

This study obtains the sensory description of different botanical bee pollen (BP) profiles and shows the differences between dried and fresh-frozen BP organoleptic characterization. Fifty-four (n=54) samples of fresh-frozen (n=27) and dried (n=27) BP pellets were analyzed for botanical and descriptive sensory aspects. The palynological results identified unifloral (Echium sp.), bifloral (Citrus sp. and Cistus sp.), and polyfloral (Leguminoseae, Rosaceae, and Myrtaceae families) BP. The use of Hierarchical Cluster Analysis revealed that four different groups were separated, corresponding to all dried BP, fresh-frozen Echium sp., fresh-frozen polyfloral and fresh-frozen Citrus sp. and Cistus sp. Discriminant Analysis returned satisfactory results as 83.3% of all BP samples were correctly classified. No classification for different botanical origin in dried BP samples was possible based on their sensory properties. However, all fresh-frozen BP samples were differentiated according to their sensory profile coinciding with the results of the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The first two discriminant functions explained 94% of the variance. The sensory profile for fresh-frozen BP was defined and the classification precision was also achieved. On the contrary, all samples that went under drying treatment presented the same sensory profile. These results suggested that sensory profile could be used as predictor to classify fresh-frozen BP based on its botanical origin.