Hi all In response to Penny's response to this thread - I think I did not state my idea clearly enough. It was mentioned that the problem with such a bee whould be that it would allow poisonous honey. This is not so. To make a bee that is resistant to such a poison one would have to go about a reasonable complex procedure. The bee would have to be able to metabolise the poison with enzymes (just like bacteria did for the oil spill from the Exon Valdez) converting the poison into harmless substances.(This would be a big job in itself as breaking the ring structure in the poison would be hampered by the natural antioxidants in honey.) In such a way bees would be bioremediating their honey. One could put in a safe guard by say making it that only after metamorphosis bees can produce the enzymes. Then the colonie would die unless the honey was pure as young bees would die. This would all have to use some pretty wacky DNA manipulation that would most probably mean that trade marked strains would be infertile if crossed with wild strains. This is just a personal flight of fancy - another idea that goes along a similar vein is to clone the genes for certain viruses that actually kill insect pests of certain fruits into the bees so they are produced in the mouth parts of the bee - then it would go about infecting all flowers with pest specific viruses meaning that all fruit that set will be infected and thus protected. (I am sure this is a technically very difficult feat) In this way you could have brands of bees for pollinating certain crops etc. (eg Buckfast/etc virus tm and so on) Then one would not need the above pesticide resistant bees and one would never do this because pesticides are more economically addictive than narcotics - a drug addict dies a farmer who uses pesticides thrives, only his kids die - and lots of tax comes of agro chemicals and little of environmentally responsible actions (eg look at the opposition to food grade mineral oil treatment of varroa - legislation in some countries stating that dangerous poisons must be used rather than this often equally succesful treatment) In every problem there is an opportunity to make money - as long as we look at problems and find problems with cures to the a cure, it will never be found. Just my two cents (given what the South Africa Rand is worth those cents are alomost centsless!) Garth --- Garth Cambray Kamdini Apiaries 15 Park Road Apis melifera capensis Grahamstown 800mm annual precipitation 6139 Eastern Cape South Africa Phone 27-0461-311663 3rd year Biochemistry/Microbiology Rhodes University Interests: Flii's and Bees. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this post in no way reflect those of Rhodes University.