Relationship between honeybee nutrition and their microbial communities

Abstract

The microbiota and the functional genes actively involved in the process of breakdown and utilization of pollen grains in beebread and bee guts are not yet understood. The aim of this work was to assess the diversity and community structure of bacteria and archaea in Africanized honeybee guts and beebread as well as to predict the genes involved in the microbial bioprocessing of pollen using state of the art 'post-light' based sequencing technology. A total of 11 bacterial phyla were found within bee guts and 10 bacterial phyla were found within beebread. Although the phylum level comparison shows most phyla in common, a deeper phylogenetic analysis showed greater variation of taxonomic composition. The families Enterobacteriaceae, Ricketsiaceae, Spiroplasmataceae and Bacillaceae, were the main groups responsible for the specificity of the bee gut while the main families responsible for the specificity of the beebread were Neisseriaceae, Flavobacteriaceae, Acetobacteraceae and Lactobacillaceae. In terms of microbial community structure, the analysis showed that the communities from the two environments were quite different from each other with only 7 % of species-level taxa shared between bee gut and beebread. The results indicated the presence of a highly specialized and well-adapted microbiota within each bee gut and beebread. The beebread community included a greater relative abundance of genes related to amino acid, carbohydrate, and lipid metabolism, suggesting that pollen biodegradation predominantly occurs in the beebread. These results suggests a complex and important relationship between honeybee nutrition and their microbial communities.

Microorganisms in Honey

“…New methodologies have made it possible to access information about the differences in the profile of this microbiota in different apiculture sources [118][119][120][121], species [53,122] and genetic diversity [116] of honeybees, development stages [53,68,117,[122][123][124][125][126], nutrition [116,127], location inside the gut [49,53,68] and digestive system [120], ontogenetic stage and geographic location [118,122,125], environmental conditions [128], health control [129], and individual [116,125].…”

“…These methods, although they have different principles, were able to distinguish similarly the narrow niche of bacterial species and the diversity of strains present in these matrices [120]. In some works, the complete genome [132,133] or metagenome [114,115] of the narrow range of species of microorganisms is accessed, enabling the search for specific functions of these bacteria for beehives by gene annotation, PCR screening [114], and Post-Light TM ion semiconductor sequencing [127]. Fluorescent in situ hybridization microscopy has also been used to characterize distribution and abundance of specific phyla across the life cycle and among gut organs [68].…”

Honey bee gut microbial communities are robust to the fungicide Pristine® consumed in pollen

“…This diversity can change with age (Anderson et al 2015), season (Hroncova et al 2015;Ludvigsen et al 2015), and nutrition (Ludvigsen et al 2015;Saraiva et al 2015). In this study, we used high-throughput sequencing to examine the effects of feeding pollen with added Pristine® on the composition and diversity of microbial communities in the gut of nurse bees (i.e., worker bees that care for brood).…”

Euphorbia plant latex is inhabited by diverse microbial communities

“…4A) and Neisseriaceae (Fig. 4B) recently were isolated from honey bees and bumble bees (Kwong and Moran, 2013; Saraiva et al, 2015). These findings suggest a possible insect‐driven transfer to Euphorbia latex, although the mechanism of transfer has yet to be elucidated.…”