The influence of social lifestyles on host-microbe symbioses in the bees

Abstract

Microbiomes are increasingly recognised as critical for the health of an organism. In eusocial insect societies, frequent social interactions allow for high fidelity transmission of microbes across generations, leading to closer host-microbe coevolution. The microbial communities of bees with different social lifestyles are less well studied, and few comparisons have been made between taxa that vary in social structure. To address this gap, we leveraged a cloud-computing resource and publicly available transcriptomic data to conduct a survey of microbial diversity in bee samples from a variety of social lifestyles and taxa. We consistently recover the core microbes of well-studied corbiculates, supporting this method's ability to accurately characterise microbial communities. We find that the bacterial communities of bees are influenced by host location, phylogeny, and social lifestyle, although no clear effect was found for fungal or viral microbial communities. Bee genera with more complex societies tend to harbour more diverse microbes, with Wolbachia detected more commonly in solitary tribes. We present the first description of the microbiota of Euglossine bees and find that they do not share the "corbiculate" core microbiome. Notably, we find that bacteria with known anti-pathogenic properties are present across social bee genera, suggesting that symbioses that enhance host immunity are important with higher sociality. Our approach provides an inexpensive means of exploring microbiomes of a given taxa and identifying avenues for further research. These findings contribute to our understanding of the relationships between bees and their associated microbial communities, highlighting the importance of considering microbiome dynamics in investigations of bee health.