4094392
Distinctive gut microbioata of honey bees assessed using deep sampling from individual worker bees
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Adult workers of the honey bee, Apis mellifera, appear to possess a normal gut microbiota dominated by about eight distinctive bacterial species, based on several non-culture based studies. However, previous studies have been based on relatively few sequences from pooled samples, so the extent of variation inmicrobiota among individuals within and between colonies and locations has not been clear. We surveyed the gut microbiota of 40 individual adult workers from two sites, Arizona and Maryland USA, sampling  four colonies per site. Universal primers were used to amplify regions of 16S ribosomal RNA genes, and amplicons were sequenced using 454 pyrotag methods, enabling analysis of about 330,000 bacterial reads. Of these, over 99% of the resulting sequences belonged to clusters for which the first blastn hits inGenBank were members of known bee phylotypes. Four of the phylotypes, belonging to Gammaproteobacteria, Betaproteobacteria and two Lactobacillus species, were present in every bee, though their frequencies varied.  Statistical tests for differences in microbiota community profile among colonies and sites revealed significant differences, and these differences were largely due to the presence of two species of Enterobacteriaceae in some Arizona colonies; these two species have not been retrieved previously from bees and potentially represent pathogens or perturbation of the normalmicrobiota. Overall, these results show that the species typical in the normal microbiota are widespread but that their relative abundances vary among worker bees.