The gut microbiota affects the social network of honeybees

RNA-sequencing of gut and different brain regions of gnotobiotic honeybees The microbiota composition in the gut of bees was manipulated to produce four treatments: bees were either (i) kept microbiota-depleted (MD) or colonized with (ii) a gut homogenate (CL), (iii) a synthetic community of 13 gut microbiota strains (CL_13), or (iv) two strains of Bifidobacterium asteroides (CL_Bifi). The four colonization treatments were performed at first day of adult emergence of bees collected at the pupal stage from ten different hives. We sampled the gut of each of 40 bees, as well as the brain, which was further dissected into the mushroom bodies (MB), the antennal lobes and subaesophageal ganglion (AL) and the optic lobes (OL). Each sample was sequenced twice (across two lanes) on a Illumina HiSeq 4000 sequencer.