Hello Jim,


     You wrote:" Has anyone ever seen any sort of science to support this
highly creative viewpoint?"


 


Well, since you said "any sort of science," I felt obliged to add the
following.


 


Testing the effect of Bt maize pollen in the field 


In the first year the bee colonies happened to be infested with parasites
(microsporidia). This infestation led to a reduction in the number of bees
and subsequently to reduced broods in the Bt-fed colonies as well as in the
colonies fed on Bt-toxin-free pollen. The trial was therefore discontinued
at an early stage.


This effect was significantly more marked in the Bt-fed colonies. (The
significant differences indicate an interaction of toxin and pathogen on the
epithelial cells of the honeybee intestine. The underlying mechanism which
causes this effect is unknown.)


It was not possible to investigate the influence of microsporidia further
since the attempt to breed them failed, making targeted infection of bee
colonies impossible.


http://www.gmo-safety.eu/en/safety_science/68.docu.html

 

 

 

The study was done over several years (2001-2004) by Hans-Hinrich Kaatz at
the U of Jena, Germany. Please don't make the mistake of thinking I'm
defending the study. He fed large amounts of pollen from BT corn to bees and
watched for effects. He had a serendipitous finding that bees with
microsporidia (read Nosema) were more heavily affected. Speculation was that
the combination affected the lining of the bees' guts. 

 

The study was not followed, at least in part because the amounts of BT
pollen fed were so high as to have little relationship to the smaller
amounts a healthy colony could collect. Still, this is exactly the sort of
thing our investigators expect to find right now.

 

This is just something I "stumbled" on while doing the intense,
concentrated, months-long research for my Apr ABJ article on CCD. :-)

 

Dick Marron


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