(1st Place) Changes in taxonomic and metabolic profiles of bumble bee queen microbiotas during and after diapause

Bumblebees are key agricultural pollinators with core gut microbiotas whose functioning is important to host health. During bumblebee queens’ winter hibernation, which occurs just before they establish colonies alone in the spring, these microbial communities are disturbed and become dominated by non-core microbes. It is suspected that queens seed the gut microbiotas of their colonies through social interactions, and so it is important that their gut microbiotas recover post-hibernation to a typical community structure. Furthermore, pesticide exposure, which is pervasive in agricultural environments and can deplete core bee gut microbes, may impede this recovery. In this study we examined how bumblebee gut microbial community structure, functional potential, and host health are affected by hibernation with the additional stress of pesticide exposure. We put Bombus impatiens queens into hibernation for four months and euthanized them periodically to sample their gut microbiotas. In addition, we allowed some queens to recover from hibernation before euthanasia, exposing half to glyphosate, an extremely common herbicide, for the recovery duration. In this talk we present data from whole-community, shotgun metagenomic sequencing of microbial DNA from queen guts to describe changes in the taxonomic structure and functional potentials of their gut microbiotas through hibernation, and after recovery with and without glyphosate. To complement sequencing data, we link these changes in community structure to host health by monitoring queen weight. This research presents a comprehensive picture of bumblebee gut microbiota dynamics during a crucial stage in colony founding that can help inform pesticide use practices in agriculture.