*3.1. Compliance of Imported Honey with Standards*

The conformity assessment of imported honey samples, based on the UAE honey standard [35] in Table 1, is presented in Table 2. The data presented are arranged to identify the types of honey that are more likely to be adulterated. An evaluation of 1330 samples collected revealed that 79.2% conformed with UAE legislation. The level of non-conformity was lower than the 64.4% reported by Al-Farsi et al. (2018) [6] for 58 honey samples collected from 18 geographical regions in Oman, following a comparison with Gulf Standardization Organization (GSO) standards. It is notable that Boussaid et al. (2018) [28] found that all 9 honey samples examined in Tunisia complied with the Codex Alimentarius standards.


**Table 1.** UAE standards of honey [35].

\* The permissible moisture content in honey according to the UAE standard was previously 17% [36].


**Table 2.** Summary of imported honey compliance with UAE standards from 2017 to 2021.

In the current study, the proportion of non-conformity ranged from 5.0 to 21.0% for the various types of honey, with the lowest values noted for forest honey. Honey, blended honey, and honeycomb had non-conformity levels that were similar, at 20.5 to 21.0%.

Table 3 presents the honey compliance across the years from 2017 to 2021. For the individual years, statistical significance was noted between the conforming and nonconforming samples. However, across the years, only 2017 was shown to be significantly different from the other years; here, 174, or 90.6%, of 1054 samples were compliant, while 18, or 9.4%, of 276 were non-compliant. None of the other years (2018, 2019, 2020 or 2021) had significantly different numbers of non-conforming samples, but in 2019, the proportion of conforming samples was the lowest.

**Table 3.** Honey compliance across the years from 2017 to 2021 using Chi-square.


a, b: Different letters indicate significant differences in the proportions of conforming and non-conforming samples across the individual years (*p* < 0.001). A, B: Different letters indicate significant differences in the proportions of conforming and non-conforming samples across the different years (*p* < 0.001).
