Assessment of Beeswax Adulteration by Paraffin and Stearic Acid Using ATR-IR Spectroscopy and Multivariate Statistics—An Analytical Method to Detect Fraud

A spectroscopic investigation of beeswax adulteration by paraffin and/or stearic acid was undertaken via Attenuated Total Reflectance Infra-Red spectroscopy (ATR-IR) combined with multivariate statistical analyses. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was successfully applied for the first time as an exploratory tool for the differentiation among pure beeswax and adulterated beeswax by paraffin and stearic acid with detection limits (LOD) of ~5% and 1%, respectively. Partial Least Square (PLS) modelling was used to build chemometric models based on beeswax/paraffin and beeswax/stearic acid calibration mixtures and subsequently used to predict concentrations of paraffin and stearic acid on a set of unknown test samples. PLS predictions demonstrated that beeswax adulteration by paraffin is much more prominent (74%) than the one by stearic acid (26%) and that commercial beeswax products (candles, pearls, blocks, etc.) are more prone to adulteration (27%) than honeycomb-type samples (12.5%).