Gut microbiome of wild and managed honeybees

Little is known about the gut microbiome of wild honeybees. Taking advantage of a large collection of wild honeybees of various subspecies from across Africa, painstakingly put together by our collaborators, we are investigating the differences in the gut microbiome of wild and managed honeybees. We are using shotgun metagenomics to resolve strain-level differences in the gut bacterial community and are currently analyzing the data to identify bacterial strains and species that are found in wild and managed honeybees and investigating their distribution across colonies of different subspecies.

Context:

• In Europe or North America, honeybees (Apis mellifera) that you’ve seen flying about was most likely from a managed farm or escaped from one (this is being freshly debated).
• “Wild” honeybees are only found across parts of Africa and Asia which is their natural habitat but, they have been transported by humans across the world over the past few centuries.
• With their simple and specialized gut microbiomes, honeybees make a great model to study the effects of domestication on the gut microbiome.

Challenge:

• Locating and sampling wild honeybees from across the world is a daunting task. Thanks to our international collaborators across Africa and amazing field ecologists from Germany, we have assembled an extensive collection of hundreds of honeybee samples.
• The differences are likely to be sublte and cannot be eaily detected by standard (amplicon sequencing) methods. We are using high-throughput next-genetation sequencing to implement shotgun metagenomics and modern bioinformatic approaches to resolve strain level differences in the gut bacterial community.

Expectations and Results:

• We have identified a number of species that are found in wild and managed honeybees and are currently investigating their distribution across colonies of different types.
• Our collection of wild honeybees span across different contries in Africa with each location harboring a different subspecies of Apis mellifera. From our previous work we expect that the strain-level differences in the gut microbiome will reflect the evolutionary history of the honeybee subspecies.