Honeybees, especially the Western honeybee Apis mellifera, are important pollinators in agricultural environments. Worker bees carry out all colony functions except for laying eggs, and their health is critical for the wellbeing of the whole hive. If these workers disappear, destructive events known as colony collapses, can result. In a colony collapse, worker bees die or leave the hive, abandoning their queen and thus forfeiting the entire hive.
The driving forces of colony collapses are both complex and unclear, but they are crucial to understand if we want to protect honeybees and the ecosystem services they provide. Thus, bee health is an important focus of both scientific research and conservation efforts around the world. Researchers are considering factors such as diseases, pesticides, changes in food sources and even stress as they study how these kinds of perturbations affect the survival, behavior and gut microbiota of honeybees. Some of these dangers have microbial origins, and some have microbial solutions.
Honeybee Gut Microbiome Offers Clues
One particularly microbe-dense habitat is the gut, which is just as important for insects, such as honeybees, as it is for mammals like ourselves. Though the gut microbiota of honeybees is relatively simple, harboring just 5 core members, it provides many benefits for their health. These include improved growth, digestion and protection from opportunistic pathogens.
What's more, the gut microbiota may play a role in what is known as the gut-brain axis, the 2-way communication between gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system. Scientists have shown that the gut microbiota affects the social behavior of honeybees
