Data from: Linking pollen foraging of megachilid bees to their nest bacterial microbiota

Solitary bees build their nests by modifying the interior of natural
cavities and they provision them with food by importing collected pollen.
As a result, the microbiota of the solitary bee nests may be highly
dependent on introduced materials. In order to investigate how the
collected pollen is associated with the nest microbiota, we used
metabarcoding of the ITS2 rDNA and the 16S rDNA to simultaneously
characterize the pollen composition and the bacterial communities of 100
solitary bee nest chambers belonging to seven megachilid species. We found
a weak correlation between bacterial and pollen alpha-diversity and
significant associations between the composition of pollen and that of the
nest microbiota, contributing to the understanding of the link between
foraging and bacteria acquisition for solitary bees. Since solitary bees
cannot establish bacterial transmission routes through eusociality, this
link could be essential for obtaining bacterial symbionts for this group
of valuable pollinators.

独居蜂通过改造天然洞穴的内部结构筑巢，并通过引入采集的花粉为巢穴提供食物。因此，独居蜂巢穴的微生物群（microbiota）可能高度依赖引入的物质。为探究采集的花粉与巢穴微生物群之间的关联，我们采用ITS2 rDNA和16S rDNA的宏条形码技术（metabarcoding），对7种切叶蜂科（megachilid）物种的100个独居蜂巢穴室的花粉组成及细菌群落进行同步表征。我们发现细菌与花粉的α多样性（alpha-diversity）之间存在弱相关性，且花粉组成与巢穴微生物群组成之间存在显著关联，这为理解独居蜂觅食行为与细菌获取之间的联系提供了依据。由于独居蜂无法通过真社会性（eusociality）建立细菌传播途径，这种联系对于这一类重要传粉者获取细菌共生体可能至关重要。