Abstract
As the sole reproductive female in a honey bee (Apis mellifera) colony, the queen’s health is critical to colony productivity and longevity. Beekeeping operations typically rely on the commercial mass production of queens for colony multiplication, which involves manipulating and isolating the queens by confining them in cages during early development. Using common queen-rearing techniques, this study shows that segregating newly eclosed queens from their worker attendants for 72 hours using queen protector cages has a significant impact on the total amount of gut bacteria carried by those queens compared to queens that have unrestricted access to attendants upon eclosion. Isolated virgin queens sampled immediately after isolation at 4 days post eclosure had significantly more bacteria and a less consistent microbiota composition than their non-isolated peers. Furthermore, this effect lasted into the mating life of queens, since mated queens that had been isolated after emergence and then sampled at 14 days post eclosure also had significantly more microbiota compared to non-isolated mated queens of the same age. The causes and potential impacts of this alteration are not clear and deserve further investigation. This study also verifies earlier findings that honey bee queens lack the core microbiome found within honey bee workers.
Highlights
IntroductionHoney bees (Apis mellifera) live in colonies composed of one female queen who performs all reproductive tasks, tens of thousands of female workers, and a limited number of seasonal males, called drones [1,2]The queen passively regulates this extreme form of reproductive monopoly by releasing glandular pheromones [3,4,5], which are highly attractive to workers [6,7,8,9,10], inhibit queen rearing [11,12,13], and suppress worker ovary activation [14,15]
non-isolated mated queens (NMQs) had significantly fewer 16S rRNA gene copies and a lower Effective Number of Species than any isolated (IVQs and IMQs) queens (Fig 2A and 2B; p
We found that the gut microbial communities in honey bee queens are dominated by Acetobacteraceae and lactobacilli early in a queen’s development and transition to mainly Acetobacteraceae lineages as the queen ages
Summary
Honey bees (Apis mellifera) live in colonies composed of one female queen who performs all reproductive tasks, tens of thousands of female workers, and a limited number of seasonal males, called drones [1,2]The queen passively regulates this extreme form of reproductive monopoly by releasing glandular pheromones [3,4,5], which are highly attractive to workers [6,7,8,9,10], inhibit queen rearing [11,12,13], and suppress worker ovary activation [14,15]. Because the queen is responsible for the production of workers, colony productivity is directly linked to the queen’s overall reproductive health [16,17]. Queen failure, which can occur due to pathogens [18,19], pesticide exposure [9,20], inadequate mating [6,7,8], or a combination of factors, has recently been reported as one of the top causes of colony losses in the U.S [21,22,23]. To avoid sudden queen failure, many modern beekeepers have stopped relying on a colony’s natural queen replacement processes [2,24].
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