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Gut microbiota composition is associated with environmental landscape in honey bees.

  • Jones JC School of Life Sciences University of Sussex Brighton UK.
  • Fruciano C School of Earth Environment and Biological Sciences Queensland University of Technology Brisbane QLD Australia.
  • Hildebrand F European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Structural and Computational Biology Unit Heidelberg Germany.
  • Al Toufalilia H School of Life Sciences University of Sussex Brighton UK.
  • Balfour NJ School of Life Sciences University of Sussex Brighton UK.
  • Bork P European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Structural and Computational Biology Unit Heidelberg Germany.
  • Engel P Department of Fundamental Microbiology University of Lausanne Lausanne Switzerland.
  • Ratnieks FL School of Life Sciences University of Sussex Brighton UK.
  • Hughes WO School of Life Sciences University of Sussex Brighton UK.
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  • 2018-01-12
Published in:
  • Ecology and evolution. - 2018
amplicon sequencing
bacterial microbiota
honey bee
landscape exposure
oilseed rape
English There is growing recognition that the gut microbial community regulates a wide variety of important functions in its animal hosts, including host health. However, the complex interactions between gut microbes and environment are still unclear. Honey bees are ecologically and economically important pollinators that host a core gut microbial community that is thought to be constant across populations. Here, we examined whether the composition of the gut microbial community of honey bees is affected by the environmental landscape the bees are exposed to. We placed honey bee colonies reared under identical conditions in two main landscape types for 6 weeks: either oilseed rape farmland or agricultural farmland distant to fields of flowering oilseed rape. The gut bacterial communities of adult bees from the colonies were then characterized and compared based on amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. While previous studies have delineated a characteristic core set of bacteria inhabiting the honey bee gut, our results suggest that the broad environment that bees are exposed to has some influence on the relative abundance of some members of that microbial community. This includes known dominant taxa thought to have functions in nutrition and health. Our results provide evidence for an influence of landscape exposure on honey bee microbial community and highlight the potential effect of exposure to different environmental parameters, such as forage type and neonicotinoid pesticides, on key honey bee gut bacteria. This work emphasizes the complexity of the relationship between the host, its gut bacteria, and the environment and identifies target microbial taxa for functional analyses.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
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Persistent URL
https://folia.unifr.ch/global/documents/76846
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