Mexico is the fourth largest honey producer and fifth largest honey
exporter in the world. A Smithsonian researcher and colleagues helped rural
farmers in Mexico to quantify the genetically modified organism (GMO) soybean
pollen in honey samples rejected for sale in Germany. Their results will appear
Feb. 7 in the online journal, Scientific Reports.
ADVERTISEMENT
David Roubik, senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical
Research Institute, and colleagues developed the ability to identify pollen
grains in honey in Panama and in Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s when they
studied the effects of the arrival of Africanized bees on native bees.
“Nobody else can do this kind of work in the ‘big field’ environment and
be confident that what they are seeing are soybean pollen grains,” said
Roubik. They found that six honey samples from nine hives in the Campeche
region contained soy pollen in addition to pollen from many wild plant species.
The pollen came from crops near the bee colonies in several small apiaries.
Due to strict European regulations, rural farmers in the Mexican
Yucatan face significant price cuts or outright rejection of their honey crop
when their product contains pollen from GMO crops that are not for human
consumption. The regional agricultural authorities, furthermore, seemed unaware
that bees visited flowering soybeans to collect nectar and pollen.
“As far as we could determine, every kind of GMO soybean grown in
Campeche is approved for human consumption,” said Roubik. “But honey
importers sometimes do no further analysis to match GMO pollen grains with
their source.”
To test the honey for GMO pollen, researchers from the Smithsonian, El
Colegio de la Frontera Sur la Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan and el Instituto
Nacional de Investigaciones Forestales, Agropecuarias y Pecuarias sent the nine
samples to Intertek laboratory in Bremen, Germany, for genetic analysis. Two
samples tested positive for GMO pollen.
“We
cautiously interpret these results as significant for elsewhere in Mexico where
some five times the GMO soy grown in Campeche is found and beekeeping is alive
and well, not to mention the rest of the world,” said Roubik. “Bee
colonies act as extremely sensitive environmental indicators. Bees from a
single colony may gather nectar and pollen resources from flowers in a
200-square-kilometer area. With an economy based on subsistence agriculture
associated with honey production, the social implications of this shift in the
status of honey are likely to be contentious and have profound implications for
beekeeping in general.”
Read
more at the Smithsonian Tropical Research
Institute.
Pollenating
Bee image via Shutterstock.