Honeybees are critical to our agriculture system – pollinating and supporting the growth of every one in three bites of food we eat. Despite their indispensable role, honeybees face many problems that weaken their populations including pesticides, habitat loss and rising diseases. The consequences of these problems seem to be steadily growing as honeybee losses continue to climb, with Canada seeing unsustainable honeybee losses for decades.
Researchers Dr. Emma Allen-Vercoe and PhD fellow Dr. Brendan Daisley are turning their attention to an overlooked piece of the puzzle: the tiny organisms living inside the bees themselves.
“We know gut microbes help with everything from digesting pollen to defending against disease,” says Daisley. “The problem is – we don’t know what constitutes that healthy microbiome – or how we can boost all bees to above that baseline”
Thus Allen-Vercoe and Daisley started The Canadian Bee Gut Project, an initiative supported be citizen-science.
“The biggest thing for us was to get honeybee samples from across Canada that were managed by real beekeepers – ones who had different ways of taking care of their bees, that way we have a realistic picture of what the bees are facing.” says Liz Mallory, an MSc student working with the Canadian Bee Gut Project.
The team has done various outreach work to reach those people, attending and presenting at beekeeper association meetings across several provinces, and designing an interactive booth at The Royal Winter Fair to educate the agricultural community on their mission.
More than 120 beekeepers across Canada have joined the project, sending samples of their honeybees alongside health metrics and comments, from over 1000 hives. Beekeepers’ involvement ultimately drove the success of the Canadian Bee Gut Project; with honeybees from all kinds of operations – backyard hobbyists to large-scale apiaries – giving the team insights into bees from all sorts of backgrounds and management practices.
“Without the beekeepers we wouldn’t have the data that allows us to look into the microbial fingerprint associated with strong, healthy colonies, or, with problems like disease”, says Daisley, “now we can look into factors such as region, antibiotic use, management practices and colony performance.” With the completion of such a successful sample collection, the team is rapidly analyzing and working in the lab to soon be able to give practical solutions back to the same beekeepers to strengthen bee health across Canada.
