Peter Borst said:

> As James and you have pointed out, nobody is at this point actually
> producing GM honey bees.

> But I think that it is worth discussing now why they should or should not.
> It looks as if it is right around the corner, to me.

So, while we are now all (at long last) in agreement that there is no monster
under the bed, the discussion should go on, just in case there MIGHT be
monsters under the bed at some point in the future?

What possible future?  Bottom line, NO ONE is going to invest the small
mountain of cold hard cash required to make a GM honey bee.  There are
far too many "better markets" out there for GM products.  A "GM Super Bee"
would never even pay back the sunk capital investment, let alone the salaries
of the team that would have to work for about a decade or so to produce a
"practical" GM bee.  I don't ever see a lucrative enough market to support this,
even if every beekeeper planet-wide pledged to buy nothing else.

> Do you think I am speculating too much?

No, at this point it has gone far beyond mere speculation,
and is well into hallucination.  :)

> They say it's "not too far off where you'll take a newborn baby to a
> doctor who will be able to read out from a blood sample the genetic
> makeup of the individual." Then, give it a series of vaccines to clean
> up all the genetic irregularities!

"They" also promised that we would all have flying cars by now.
Where's MY flying car?

> And we will have the humble honey bee to thank for being the
> "guinea pigs" where such tinkering was perfected.

I don't think that the parents of any child born with a serious problem
would call this sort of thing "tinkering".  They would call it a "miracle".

It is very true that honey bees are being and will continue to be used
in the lab as "platforms" for the study of all sorts of things, just like
"white mice" (which are actually gray in all labs I have seen).  But this
will not result in any "new and improved" or "Frankenstein" bees, any
more than the creation of "Onco-Mouse" resulted in a new and improved
or scary and dangerous mice.  (Onco-mouse is a special breed of mouse
used in the study of cancer.)

        jim