Incipiently social carpenter bees (Xylocopa) host distinctive gut
bacterial communities and display geographic structure as revealed by
full-length 16S sequencing
Abstract
The gut microbiota of bees affect nutrition, immunity, and host fitness,
yet the role of diet, sociality, and geographic variation in determining
microbiome structure, including strain-level diversity and relatedness,
remain poorly understood. Here, we use full-length 16S amplicon
sequencing to compare the crop and gut microbiomes of two incipiently
social carpenter bee species, Xylocopa sonorina and Xylocopa
tabaniformis, from multiple geographic sites within each species’ range.
We found that Xylocopa species share a set of core taxa consisting of
Bombilactobacillus, Bombiscardovia, and Lactobacillus apis, found in
>95% of all individual bees sampled, and Gilliamella and
Apibacter were also detected in the gut of both species with high
frequency. The crop bacterial community of both species was comprised
nearly entirely of Apilactobacillus with occasionally abundant nectar
bacteria. Despite sharing core taxa, Xylocopa species’ microbiomes were
distinguished by multiple bacterial lineages, including species-specific
strains of core taxa. In both bee species, bacterial species exhibited
geographic patterns in the presence of specific sequence variants. The
use of long-read amplicons revealed otherwise cryptic species and
population-level differentiation in core microbiome members which was
masked when a shorter fragment of the 16S (V4) was considered. We
conclude that these Xylocopa species host a distinctive microbiome,
similar to that of previously characterized social apids, which suggests
that further investigation to understand the evolution of bee microbiome
and its drivers is warranted.