So...GMO Honey Bees....

This is very interesting to me.....and here is a long article:

GMOs. Few acronyms induce as much debate at the dinner table, forming rifts between relatives about the very food on our plates. Tinkering with an organism’s genes is almost as divisive as politics. So why aren’t we talking about agriculture’s potential pollinator of the future: the genetically engineered honey bee?

Genetically engineered honey bees were first created by Christina Schulte and her colleagues at the Heinrich-Heine University of Düsseldorf, Germany.1 In 2014, it was breakthrough research.

Motivated by a need for more advanced genetic tools to support honey bee scientific inquest, they painstakingly created, characterized, and catalogued the method for producing transgenic (genetically modified) honey bees, which was subsequently published in the high-profile journal PNAS.

This opened endless possibilities for unraveling basic questions of honey bee biology. In the distant future, it could even enable industrial applications, like engineering honey bees to resist disease (although unlikely – more on this later). But four years after their seminal work, the literature has not blossomed with innovative revelations enabled by the technique; rather, the response has been more like the sound of crickets.

It’s not obvious why uptake of this method has been so slow, especially since honey bee researchers, who have been craving better tools for precise genetic manipulation, could benefit immensely. Schulte’s technique could, for example, allow us to introduce gene variants – different alleles – into the honey bee genome and watch how that changes their morphology, development, or behavior to decipher the gene’s specific function.

Theoretically, it could help us pinpoint the causal mechanisms of anything from disease resistance to queen longevity, or assign functions to the thousands of honey bee genes whose jobs are currently unknown.2 Importantly, it could also allow us to manipulate economically useful traits independently of costly, laborious breeding programs. Whether it’s a good idea is up for debate, but either way, why hasn’t this technique been taken advantage of by scientists?

I was a new graduate student when I stumbled upon Schulte’s paper for the first time. Just a few months into my degree, I had already decided that my thesis topic was going to be working out the molecular mechanism of hygienic behavior. I even had a few genes in mind, whose functions suggested how they might be contributing to hygienicity, but which hadn’t yet been proven. Naturally, when I read about Schulte’s work on genetically modified honey bees, I thought, “That is SO cool!” I could use the technique to create honey bees that produce large amounts of the supposedly ‘hygienic’ genes, then observe what exactly these bees were able to do which regular bees couldn’t.

By doing these tests, I should be able to decipher if and how those genes really cause hygienic behavior – that is, identify the underlying molecular mechanism of a complex trait: the pinnacle goal of my thesis. Several months later, I found myself in Germany learning how to do the technique from the pros. It was then that I realized this method would be a lot harder than it seemed.

The road to creating a genetically modified honey bee is not for the unenthused. I quickly learned that it involves collecting thousands of 0-1.5 hour old eggs straight from the colony, microinjecting them with a concoction containing a gene insert and an enzyme that splices it into the genome (all done manually, in a hot room, using a microscopically fine glass needle), incubating the injected eggs until they hatch, grafting the larvae into queenless colonies, retrieving capped queen cells to emerge in a cage, inducing them to lay drones by gassing them with carbon dioxide, then screening those drones to see how many actually contain the new gene in their germ line (reproductive cells), allowing it to be passed on from generation to generation (Figure 1).

At every step, there’s a high likelihood of failure, and these layers of probable let-down compound with each other to make producing a real genetically modified queen a very unlikely event.

Eggs are collected from a hive and microinjected with a tiny amount of genetic material, including the gene to be inserted and an enzyme (transposase) that does the cutting and pasting. Many of these eggs die, but some survive and hatch, which are ….

Now...what if these bees are the cause of the honey bee deaths we hear about?

I mean, GMO corn cant be grown by another farmer without purchasing rights.

Why wouldn't they kill off bees by introducing GMO honey bees that pollinate with something that "tags" the flora it pollinates?

The graphic is kind of telling as to how it could be done.



americanbeejournal.com...

So...This apiarist has written a ton on the ability to modify bees.

It is actually very interesting and disturbing....

Importantly, they aren’t breeding a disease-resistant lineage to disseminate – instead, they have created the tools to allow breeders to produce diverse stock themselves.

“These aren’t GMO bees,” Foster clarifies. “What we’re doing is enriching the natural disease resistance that already exists in the population.” The lab testing will be offered as a service to bee breeders for a fee, with the hope that breeders will use it to choose which colonies to propagate in their own breeding programs.

Now why would they clarify that? Directly after the statement the article implies that they are genetically modifying the bees.

Both of these "articles" are within the last 2 years.

What if this is the cause of the bee die offs you see in the news every now and then?

alisonmcafeeblogs.wordpress.com...-849

a reply to: Vasa Croe

The problem is that according to the article the first modified bee was produced in 2014. Colony Collapse Disorder was noticed on a large scale in 2006.

It takes many generations to find out what went wrong with genetically modifying something. On top of that, the honey they produce when the gene modification causes some future problem may be toxic. How, ask the cows that ate GMO grass in Texas, oh wait, you cannot ask dead cows. The grass genes mutated after about five or so years and became toxic.

I thought bee colony collapse happened because of some pesticides, right?

We still don't kno w what hygienicity is exactly......and should have been explained since it's easy to take it as clean

Yea up there watchandwait.....glyphosate

originally posted by: Vasa Croe
Now...what if these bees are the cause of the honey bee deaths we hear about?

I mean, GMO corn cant be grown by another farmer without purchasing rights.

Why wouldn't they kill off bees by introducing GMO honey bees that pollinate with something that "tags" the flora it pollinates?

The graphic is kind of telling as to how it could be done.

americanbeejournal.com...

Wow. That theory you have Vasa could be total BS but it rings of Monsanto winning and the people who need those bees being forced to buy the bees to pollinate the crops. We do see bees being used to pollinate are moved around and there is a downturn in bee colonies from the reports I see. Something is happening to them. Fortunately, there are other bee/wasp like species that pollinate like the wood boring bee and the dirt daubers. My garden and plants were pollinated by the wood boring bees the last few years.

a reply to: Vasa Croe

Did you post this in the wrong forum?

Bees ... sounds familiar .... oh it is

a reply to: Vasa Croe

i know of another GMO bee.... the Africanized killer bee... no thanks.

hmmmm? i mist this wen first posted.
why was it hiden?
we live in a ever more controlled world.
and they have no idea what they are doing.

originally posted by: buddha
and they have no idea what they are doing.

They know what they are doing they just don't want you to know that you have to die.

But, you do know that you have to die, don't you?

Maybe they just don't want you to harp on it while you are alive.

originally posted by: smkymcnugget420
a reply to: Vasa Croe

i know of another GMO bee.... the Africanized killer bee... no thanks.

Those weren't GMO bees they are Native to Africa and escaped from a lab in S. America way back last century. They have interbred some with but primarily wipe out competition leaving the domesticated bees dead if they share the same area. We shouldn't be bringing insects from other regions of Earth. There are so many accidental things like this release of dangerous bees it is scary to consider.