**1. Introduction**

Honey and apicultural products such as pollen, beebread, propolis, and royal jelly have been consumed since antiquity [1] and used in pharmaceutical products and supplements worldwide with broad approval of their beneficial effect on human health [2–5]. Therefore, they should be free from contaminants linked to undesired health effects that also reduce their quality and commercial value. Recent reports designate that the EU is only 60% honey self-sufficient, with an apparent negative equilibrium of imports/exports [6]. Therefore, it relies on imports to a large extent. Hence, the need to increase honey and related apiculture commodities production in the EU is apparent. Such an increase should be accompanied by the quality management of apiculture activity. A major category of contaminants is pesticides, considering that plant protection products (PPPs) are indispensable and broadly applied for the protection of cultivated crops. Evidently, pesticides are strongly related to bees and apicultural commodities since plants and flowers, as the major pollen and nectar resources, can contain such substances. Exposure of bees to contaminants not only affects honey and other apicultural products' quality [7] but also can have negative effects on their health, even at concentrations found in environmental compartments [8,9]. In order to ensure the quality and safety of apicultural products, such as food, with the main focus on honey, well-organized monitoring programs and sustainable management are necessary, combined with powerful and fully validated analytical methods making use of

**Citation:** Kasiotis, K.M.; Zafeiraki, E.; Manea-Karga, E.; Anastasiadou, P.; Machera, K. Pesticide Residues and Metabolites in Greek Honey and Pollen: Bees and Human Health Risk Assessment. *Foods* **2023**, *12*, 706. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods 12040706

Academic Editors: Liming Wu and Qiangqiang Li

Received: 29 December 2022 Revised: 23 January 2023 Accepted: 31 January 2023 Published: 6 February 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

the most recent technologies in the area. Hence, analytical methods have been developed, validated, and applied by a plethora of research groups for the detection of pesticides and metabolites [10–12], other organic pollutants, pyrrolizidine alkaloids [13], and heavy metals [14,15]. The presented work, as a continuation of previous work of our research group [11], aims to provide an overview of the pesticides and metabolites occurrence in honey, pollen, and beebread samples during the period of 2015–2020 in Greece and add further data on the contribution of pesticide residues to the overall chemical burden related to food consumption, human and bee health.
