J. APIC. SCI. Vol. 57 No. 2 2013 5 Pollen from genetically modified Plants in honey – Problems with quantification and ProPer labelling Ewelina Żmijewska 1 Dariusz Teper 2 Anna Linkiewicz 1 * Sławomir Sowa 1 abstr act maize can be a valuable source of pollen when plants attractive for bees are not avail- able. honeybees can forage from conventional maize as well as from genetically modiied (gm) maize. the court of Justice of the european union (eu) ruled that pollen in honey must be treated as a food ingredient and therefore falls within the scope of regulation 1829/2003/ec on gm food and feed and requires authorization. gm pollen unauthor- ized in the eu cannot be present in honey at any level, and honey must be labelled if it contains more than 0.9% of pollen from authorized gm plants in relation to total pollen content. however, currently available analytical methods allow only for estimation of gm pollen quantity in honey. therefore, directive 2001/110/ec related to honey needs to be amended so that pollen can be regarded as a natural constituent of honey. because the eu is a big honey importer, validated and harmonized detection methods are necessary for the control of gm pollen in honey. Keywords: gmo, honey, labelling, maize, pollen. 1 GMO Controlling Laboratory, Department of Plant Biotechnology and Cytogenetics, Plant Breeding and Acclimatization Institute – National Re- search Institute, Radzików, Poland 2 Research Institute of Horticulture, Apiculture Division, Puławy, Poland introduction The honeybee is inextricably linked with ento- mophilous spermatophyte plants, which are the main source of the energy (nectar) and protein (pollen) for honeybees that are necessary for rearing the next generations of bees. However, worker honeybees frequently visit the lowers of anemophilous plants and gather only pollen (Prabucki, 1998). The attractiveness of these plants depends primarily on their pollen eficiency, which is usually higher than that of entomophilous taxa. Maize (Zea mays L. subsp. mays group Saccharata) has a pollen eficiency of 173 kg pollen/ha (Nowakowski and Morse, 1982). Since implementation of the European Union (EU) Regulation 1829/2003/EC on genetically modiied (GM) food and feed, pollen in honey has been classiied as a natural component, and honey containing GM pollen has not required labelling. Recently, however, this situation changed because the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) judged that pollen is a honey ingredient and that honey containing GM pollen can be placed on the market only if GM pollen has been authorized as food and proper labelling is in place (Court of Justice, 2011). The EU accounts for around 13% of global honey production (200,000 tonnes), where the largest producer is Spain (33,000 tonnes), followed by Italy, Hungary, Romania (each produce around 22,000 tonnes), and Portugal (21,000 tonnes) (European Commission, 2012a). Honey production in the EU is not suficient for con- sumption and industry needs. Therefore, ap- proximately 40% of honey used in the EU is imported from third-party countries (European Parliament, 2013). Many GM plants (maize, cotton, soybean, sugar beet, rapeseed) are cultivated *corresponding author: a.linkiewicz@ihar.edu.pl Received 02 August 2013; accepted 27 November 2013 DOI: 10.2478/jas-2013-0013 J. APIC. SCI. Vol. 57 No. 2 2013 Review Article Unauthenticated | 10.248.254.158 Download Date | 8/26/14 2:41 AM