The comment made by one of the listers about not wanting his hives taken because of their having a patented gene is a good one.  In Canada a farmer lost his case vs. Monsanto who found one of their GM crops in his field when he hadn't bought it.  He claimed the pollen blew in and pollinated his crop, part of the seed of which he keeps for replanting.  He now has to pay damages because the judge ruled that a farmer should know his crop well enough to know whether or not it is 'his' (even though you cannot physically tell a difference between the GM and non-GM crop!).  What are beekeepers going to do?  Restrain their virgin queens?  Will GM bees perhaps have a gene that makes it impossible for them to produce drones (hey-might help with varroa control).  Beekeepers "replant their seed" year after year. For GM bees to be profitable to the manufacturer each beekeeper would either have to rebuy the queens from the producer annually (like GM crop farmers do), pay an exhorbitant amount to purchase them in the first place, or pay annual dues for the privilege of housing and using the GM bees.  If your GM drone inseminates my non-gm queen, but so do 19 non-gm drones, do I have to destroy 1/20th of my hive?  How do I know which are gm and which aren't?  Policing the system is impossible, impractical and costly.  I predict we will never see GM bees unless the government pays for their development and gives them out without licences and desires no profit in return.

Personally I think we might as well remove restrictions on importing queens from other countries to expand the gene pool of our bees and be able to better breed desirable traits.  Vigilance is needed to stop the importation of other pests (but the hive beetle got in anyways, eh?), but the absolute ban is really now more wasteful than productive, in my opinion.

Martin Damus