ANALYTICAL RESULTS

TLC Results

As seen in the Table 1 above, it was found out that 6 out of 40 samples of the branded honey and 12 out of the 60 samples of the unbranded honey were positive for antibiotics. Overall in the 100 samples, 5% of samples contained penicillin G, 6% contained streptomycin, 7% contained tetracycline and none of the samples contained gentamycin. TLC was a detection step in the process and therefore, the samples that were positive for the various antibiotics were then used in HPLC for quantification. 

HPLC

As seen in the Table 2 above, from 5 of the samples with the highest positive from the TLC, tetracycline was the highest detected antibiotic which was calculated to be 19.98μg/mL, while penicillin G was 14.59μg/mL and streptomycin was 13.44μg/mL and with no detection in gentamycin as seen in the negative result from the TLC test. The calculations were determined by a previous research which had concluded that the retention time for the various antibiotics were: 5.63 minutes for tetracycline, 2.60 minutes for streptomycin, 10.96 minutes for gentamycin and 13.50 minutes for penicillin G.