Abstract
The gut microbiome is recognised as playing an integral role in the health and ecology of a wide variety of animal taxa. However, the relationship between social behavioural traits and the microbial community has received little attention. Honey bees are highly social and the workers perform different behavioural tasks in the colony that cause them to be exposed to different local environments. Here we examined whether the gut microbial community composition of worker honey bees is associated with the behavioural tasks they perform, and therefore also the local environment they are exposed to. We set up five observation hives, in which all workers were matched in age and observed the behaviour of marked bees in each colony over 4 days. The gut bacterial communities of bees seen performing predominantly foraging or predominantly in nest tasks were then characterised and compared based on amplicon sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. Our results show that some core members of the unique honey bee gut bacterial community are represented in different relative abundances in bees performing different behavioural tasks. The differentially represented bacterial taxa include some thought to be important in carbohydrate metabolism and transport, and also linked to bee health. The results suggest an influence of task-related local environment exposure and diet on the honey bee gut microbial community and identify focal core taxa for further functional analyses.
Highlights
The relationships between insect hosts and their microbial symbionts are increasingly recognised as being key for a variety of different ecological and evolutionary processes
We show that workers matched in age, but performing different behavioural tasks and, exposed to different local environments and diets, host significantly different gut microbial communities
Some members of the unique core microbial community were found to have different relative abundances in worker bees foraging for resources outside the colony, compared to workers performing in nest tasks
Summary
The relationships between insect hosts and their microbial symbionts are increasingly recognised as being key for a variety of different ecological and evolutionary processes. In any social insect society, including bee, ant and wasp colonies, different behavioural and/or morphological castes perform different tasks, such as caring for the brood and foraging for food required for the success of the colony. These behavioural tasks are known to be associated with multiple interacting factors including age and environment, and individuals performing these different tasks are exposed to different local environments (reviewed in Oster and Wilson 1978; Beshers and Fewell 2001; Smith et al 2008). Gut bacterial communities and behavioural phenotype in worker bees may be influenced by many of the same characteristics, e.g., diet and environment (e.g., division of labour reviewed in Johnson 2010; the bee microbiome reviewed in Engel et al 2016). This means there is likely a link between behavioural phenotype and gut bacterial community, but to date this has been little explored (but see Kapheim et al 2015)
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