Bees produce their own food for their gut bacteria
Published: Monday, Jan 15th 2024, 11:30
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Bees feed their intestinal flora with nutrients they produce themselves. According to a new study from Lausanne, the insects simply produce the nutrients for a certain intestinal bacterium themselves if these are missing in their food.
This newly discovered mechanism could play a role in the susceptibility of bees to climate change, pesticides or new pathogens, as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) and the University of Lausanne (Unil) wrote in a press release.
For the study published on Monday in the journal "Nature Microbiology", the researchers reared bees without gut bacteria and fed them exclusively with sugar water.
Bacteria are supplied
When examining the bacteria in the bee gut, the researchers found the bacterium Snodgrassella alvi, contrary to their expectations. This bacterium cannot metabolize sugar in order to grow. The fact that it colonized the bee gut even when sugar was the only food and no other bacteria were present initially left the researchers perplexed. This is because intestinal bacteria normally feed on nutrients from food.
By measuring metabolic products in the bee's intestine, the scientists discovered that the bee produces several acids, including citric acid and malic acid, which are transported into the intestine. If the Snodgrassella alvi bacteria were already present, the bees produced fewer of the acids.
Connection with vulnerability
Using specially labeled atoms, the researchers were able to prove that the intestinal bacteria are actually fed with these specially produced acids.
According to the researchers, the bees' vulnerability could be linked to this complex system of the bees' gut microbiome. "We already know that exposure to the herbicide glyphosate makes bees more susceptible to pathogens and reduces the abundance of S. alvi in the gut," said study leader Andrew Quinn from Unil in the press release. The researchers therefore want to investigate the bees' gut microbiome in more detail in further studies.
©Keystone/SDA
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