MAPPING SIX DECADES OF STINGLESS BEE HONEY RESEARCH: CHEMICAL QUALITY AND BIBLIOMETRICS

Stingless bees (Apidae: Apinae: Meliponini) process honey in cerumen pots, thus it is called pot-honey. Almost 600 species of stingless bees produce tropical pot-honey. Despite the Codex Alimentarius Commission neglecting the international regulation of this relevant meliponine product, local and national regulations are growing since 2014. Besides the higher water content and free acidity, a recent discovery of the sugar trehalulose in pot-honey is one more distinctive trait. The great entomological biodiversity has an impact on chemical composition and bioactivity of the honey, as well as the botanical origin which has been less studied due to the vast number of stingless bee species compared to the unique Apis mellifera. A bibliometric review (1962-2022) was conducted to analyze the evolution of stingless bee honey scientific literature, prolific authors, most active institutions, most productive countries, major journals used to disseminate pot-honey research, to identify theme maps and their connections to scientific disciplines using the Scopus database and the bibliometrix software. The taxonomic structure for this bibliometric review was described. In these six decades, a Venezuelan author stood out, Universidad de Los Andes was the third institution with the highest number of publications, and Venezuela ranked as the sixth most productive country after Brazil, Malaysia, Mexico, the United States, and Indonesia. A word cloud, tree map, dendrogram, and conceptual map were visualized. The network of sources and the evolution of authors' keywords were mapped with VOSviewer. This review was the first comprehensive science mapping analysis of stingless bee honey.