Pólen apícola do estado de Alagoas: composição físico-química, origem botânica e atividade antioxidante

Abstract

Beekeeping is an activity known worldwide. In Brazil, it has found favorable conditions for its establishment. In the State of Alagoas, where it is still a practicing of beekeeping craft, require official data on the quality of their products to become more professional. Among the bee products, bee pollen resulting from the agglutination of flower pollen and nectar with salivary substances, emerge as food for worker-bees, with therapeutic properties given its composition. It is rich in protein, carbohydrates, lipids, minerals and vitamins, phenols and growth factors. In apiaries, bee pollen is the main source of food and protection for the larvae of bees. As human food, it requires for marketing monitoring of its physico-chemical and microbiological quality, with limits established by the health legislation. In this work, it was assessed the floral origin and the physico-chemical, and possible antioxidant and antimicrobial activity, of bee pollen from three experimental apiaries representative of the mesoregions of Zona da Mata , Backlands and Seaside of Alagoas State, in the dry season of 2008/09. Physico-chemical data were submitted to tests of normality of Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Shapiro-Wilk, and then the non-parametric test of Kruskal-Wallis. The pollen spectrum was more abundant in the Zona da Mata region, where 28 plant species were represented in the bee pollen - 36% of the herbaceous layer and 64% of shrub and tree strata. In the bee pollen of the Seaside and Backlands predominated, respectively, tree and shrub strata, with sampling generally monofloral in the Backlands. The total contents of protein, glucose and lipids were measured respectively by the methods of Lowry, Antrona and Bligh & Dyer. The levels of total carbohydrates did not differ significantly between the bee pollen of the different mesoregions studied. The average content of total lipids and phenols in the bee pollen of the Backlands were the largest among the three mesoregions (respectively, 4.92-7.74% and 16.22-46.25 eq. mg Ac. Galic.g-1). The total content of flavonoids varied considerably, but was higher in samples of Backlands (45.62 ± 32.19 eq. quercetine.g mg-1), although near the sampling of the Zona da Mata (41.22 ± 21.95 eq. quercetine.g mg-1). The antioxidant potential of samples of bee pollen of Backlands was much higher than that of other samples of other mesoregions, ranging from 53.22 to 250.19 eq. mg ac. galic.g-1. The samples of bee pollen from the Seaside were the ones that showed higher protein content (1.21-3.32 eq. mg BSA.mL-1) and lower antioxidant content (10.0-103.22 eq. mg ac. galic.g-1), although in the qualitative point of view all the samples had similar flanonoid substances. The tested did not show activity against the microorganisms Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella Typhimurium, Escherichia coli, Helicobacter pylori concentrations of the extracts of bee pollen of the dry season (2008/09) from all mesoregions studied.