Scientific Research in School | Volume 2 | Issue 1 | 2020 the results across the zones of inhibition were significantly different or not. Table 3: Post hoc tests for the one-way ANOVA testing antimicrobial agents against B. subtilis. Treatments pair P vs A P vs C P vs H P vs MH A vs C A vs H A vs MH C vs H C vs MH H vs MH Tukey HSD Q p-value statistic 7.67 5.89 19.72 14.86 1.78 27.39 22.53 25.61 20.75 4.86 0.00101 0.00126 0.00101 0.00101 0.69512 0.00101 0.00101 0.00101 0.00101 0.01065 Inference ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 insignificant ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 * p<0.05 Table 4: Post hoc tests for the one-way ANOVA testing antimicrobial agents against E. coli. Treatments pair P vs A P vs C P vs H P vs MH A vs C A vs H A vs MH C vs H C vs MH H vs MH Tukey HSD Q p-value statistic 16.65 16.55 0.00 5.15 0.10 16.65 11.51 16.55 11.40 5.15 0.00101 0.00101 0.89999 0.00601 0.89999 0.00101 0.00101 0.00101 0.00101 0.00601 Inference ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 insignificant ** p<0.01 insignificant ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 ** p<0.01 Discussion Based on the results we can see a clear difference in the effectiveness of the manuka honey vs the store-bought honey. First in the case of Table 1 we can see that the store-bought honey did nothing to stop the growth of the bacteria forming no zone of inhibition in both E. coli and B. subtilis while the manuka honey had a very consistent zone of inhibition of around 0.5 across both bacteria. We also see from the preformed ANOVA test in Figures 5 and 6 that there is a significant difference between the manuka honey and the store-bought honey with the P value being less than 0.05 supports the original hypothesis of this experiment. Another interesting point to gain from the graphs in Figure 3 and 4 is that even though the E. coli was generally more resistant than the B. subtilis with the 90 • Science Extension Journal antibiotics having much smaller zones of inhibition on the E. coli agar plates but the manuka honey’s zone of inhibition didn’t change from bacteria to bacteria having the same effect on both of them. One of the more concerning and interesting things we can gather from the results but more specifically from Figure 2 is that the non-manuka honey actually helped the bacteria to develop with the area around the bacteria being a deep yellow showing that the bacteria were using the normal honey as a food source causing the opposite of what we wanted the honey to do. Now the main thing to gather from that is to try to figure what that means. One of the possibilities is that it’s possible that normal honey like manuka honey has antimicrobial properties but in the process of being treated to sell in the supermarket those antibacterial properties were lost. But what this does show is that manuka honey from a pharmacy is definitely better than honey bought in a super market when it comes to fighting a bacterial infection. However, these results should be taken with a grain of salt for many differing reasons. One of which is that the UMF rating of the manuka honey that I used was 15+, which isn’t nearly the highest value, meaning that it is probable that if I had used a stronger manuka honey the results could have been very different. Similarly, one of the things that I would be really interested to find out if I was able to do this experiment again is to use fresh regular honey from the honey hive rather than buying the honey from a store and see if that produces a differing result than the one I got from doing the experiment with the store-bought honey. Another one of the main issues with this experiment is how easily it can be affected by sources of error. The main source of error in this experiment was because of the layout of the petri dishes, it was possible for the zone of inhibitions to spread out into other areas causing the two zones to join as one; this can be seen in some of the images. To counter this I decided that if the zones would reach out into other zones I would write it down as a maximum value which I later decided to label as 3.0cm. Another main source of error that effected the experiment were possible problems with the method which could have happened at any stage of the experiment. The most extreme of which was that in the E. coli discs some of the penicillin discs fell off when placed in the incubator. While this had little effect on the E. coli because it was already resistant to penicillin, it shows that it was possible for other discs to fall off ruining the results. This

Science Extension Journal: Volume 2 |Number 1|September 2020