Host-microbe interactions in bees

Pollinating insects face threats ranging from chemical stress to disease. As the primary managed pollinator, much is known about the varied disease agents that impact honey bee vitality, and about the human and bee defenses that reduce disease impacts. Disease challenges faced by other managed and free-living bees are poorly understood. As part of Beenome100, we plan to develop an extensive database of microbes associated with bees from across the US, via genome assemblies for the targeted bees and subsequent screening of assembled ‘non-bee’ sequences from DNA and RNA sequencing. This will expand known resources for honey bees (e.g., Schwarz et al., 2015) and will focus on both likely pathogens and symbionts across bees. At the same time, insights into immune proteins across the sequenced targets will be used to compare immune function and redundancy across genera, lifestyles, and variable levels of sociality. The collected dataset and analyses will help monitor the sharing of microbes among pollinating bees, the likely impacts of parasites and pathogens, and the evolution of bee defenses. Resources will be broadcast through Genbank, a nascent website (www.beenome100.org), and the i5k workspace (https://data.nal.usda.gov/dataset/i5k-workspacenal).