March 2018 edition of the American Bee Journal ?What Happened to the Genetically Engineered Honey Bee.?
Ok, the madness has begun, a honey bee egg NOW can be successfully injected with genetic material. This is not going to end well. I am certain the scientists will have the best of intentions. The problem is we don?t know enough about the genetics of bees so there is going to be some experimental guess work is what the process boils down to.
Plants are one thing to experiment with, they don?t fly, they don?t sting in contrasts to the case with honey bees.
If these engineers accidentally stumble onto a lab created CAPE HONEYBEE, the bee industry would be doomed. As you may or may not know in Southern Africa there is an itialian honey bee that naturally evolved and was given the name Cape Honey bee. This bee wiped out 20,000 African honey bee hives. This is a most deadly bee on the planet. The cape bee does not cause harm to mammals, it is not aggressive, however this cape bee is absolutely deadly to all strains of honey bees. Even the feared African hiney bee had zero chance of survival after invasion by the Cape Honey bee.
How the Cape Honey Bee destroys:
A mutant bee created by harsh winds of Southern Africa. With winds so fierce and completely unpredictable the local honey bees queens seldom returned from mating flights leaving the colony queenless. The result was a mutant bee emerged, a female worker bee that laid eggs that matured to worker bees, NOT DRONES. Let me be clear, the Cape honey bee is a worker bee, not mated that lays worker bees, again NOT A DRONE LAYER.
These worker bees, not fertile, make their way into neighboring hives, the resident queen disappeares and the Cape worker bee commences to lay eggs that become workers bees that invade other colonies and the process repeats itself. The Cape Honey Bee does not collect pollen, does not do any chores, just obtains entrance to a hive and that hive is doomed. Twenty thousand African honey bee hives were destroyed by the Cape Honey Bee.
So far, to date that is, the Cape Honey bee is present only in South Africa. My immediate concern is Australia, the closest land mass.
So how can an unfertile worker bee create a seamingly fertile offspring, worker bee that is. The cape worker bee lays an unfertile egg with only one set of genes which in normal cases developes into a drone, however due to a mutation, each genes duplicates itself thus generating a worker bee with two identical sets of genes. Just as if a fertile queen laid an egg with 2 copies of each gene. There is a name for this duplication of chromosome is called a thelytoky.
I do not understand why this bee is not destroyed in Africa as the bee posses a world threat.
Blessings
Topic: Engineered Honey Bee (Read 1502 times)