Bacterial pathogens of bees

The transcriptomic signature of low aggression honey bees resembles a response to infection

“…Using these estimates, we find no significant differences in the abundance of any pathogen between high and low aggression bees, indicating that variation in aggression as a result of developmental environment is not the result of differences in infection rates. The set of pathogens we considered includes those that are known to commonly infect honey bees (Brutscher et al 2016;Evison & Jensen 2016;Funfhaus et al 2018), including Deformed Wing Virus, a strain of which has been associated with aggression in a previous study (Fujiyuki et al 2004; see also Rortais et al 2006). This approach for estimating infection rates may be useful for studies of honey bee behavior moving forward; despite the use of polyA-enrichment for extracting mRNA, substantial numbers of both bacterial and viral reads were present in our RNAseq datasets.…”

“…This database consisted of the five bacterial pathogens Melissococcus plutonius (GCF_000747585.1), Paenibacillus larvae (GCF_002003265.1), Serratia marcescens (GCF_000513215.1), Spiroplasma apis (GCF_000500935.1), and Spiroplasma melliferum (GCF_000236085.2), the chalkbrood fungus Ascosphaera apis (GCA_000149775.1), the three stonebrood fungi Aspergillus fumigatus (GCF_000002655.1), A. flavus (GCF_000006275.2), and A. niger (GCF_000002855.3), and the nine honey bee viruses Acute bee paralysis virus (GCF_000856345.1), Apis mellifera filamentous virus (GCF_001308775.1), Black queen cell virus (GCF_000851425.1), Chronic bee paralysis virus (GCF_000875145.1), Deformed wing virus (GCF_000852585.1), Israel acute paralysis virus (GCF_000870485.1), Kashmir bee virus (GCF_000853385.1), Sacbrood virus (GCF_000847625.1), and Slow bee paralysis virus (GCF_000887395.1). This list, while not exhaustive, should capture the majority of possible pathogens expected to be present in appreciable frequency (Brutscher et al 2016;Evison & Jensen 2016;Funfhaus et al 2018). When genomes were represented by multiple scaffolds, we concatenated them into a single sequence for mapping.…”

Chemical Ecology in Insect-microbe Interactions in the Neotropics

“…Other problems can be caused using antibiotics as their chemical residues accumulate in honey, reducing the longevity of the bees and selecting resistant P. larvae strains [61,68]. The European foulbrood disease is caused by the globally distributed Gram-positive, non-spore-forming bacterium M. plutonius [69]. Ingestion of larval food contaminated with M. plutonius causes infection in larvae.…”

Hymenoptera associated eukaryotic virome lacks host specificity

“…In the past decades, pressures on both managed and wild bees have increased vastly and there is evidence for declining trends in pollinator populations globally (5,6). These pressures encompass ecological factors such as habitat loss (7), pollution (8), pesticide use (9,10) and adverse agricultural practices (11), but biological factors including bacterial, parasitic, and viral infections (12)(13)(14)(15), also play a pivotal role. Recently, more attention is being given to the microbiota and their influence on bee health, development and homeostasis (16)(17)(18), and it has been shown that the microbiota can be exploited to protect bees from other pathogens (19).…”