Data from: Innovative airborne DNA approach for monitoring honey bee foraging and health

Environmental DNA (eDNA) refers to genetic material collected from the
environment and not directly from an organism. eDNA is best known as a
tool in aquatic ecology but has been found associated with almost every
substrate examined including soils, surfaces, and riding around on other
animals. The collection of eDNA from air is one of the most recent
advances and has been used to monitor a variety of organisms, including
plants, animals, and microorganisms. Current evidence suggests a high
turnover rate providing a recent signal for the presence of DNA associated
with an organism. Here, we test whether material carried in air can be
collected from honey bee hives to evaluate recent foraging behavior and
colony health. We sampled air using purpose-built “bee safe” air filters
operating for 5-6 hours at each colony. We successfully recovered plant,
fungal and microbial DNA from the air within hives over a 3-week pilot
period. From these data we identified the core honey bee microbiome and
plant interaction data representing foraging behaviour. We calculated beta
diversity to estimate the effects of apiary sites and sampling date on
data recovery. We observed that variance in ITS data was influenced by
sampling date. Given that honey bees are generalist pollinators our
ability to detect temporal signals in associated plant sequence data
suggest this method opens new avenues into the ecological analysis of
short-term foraging behavior at the colony level. In comparison variance
in microbial 16S sequencing data was more influenced by sampling location.
As the assessment of colony health needs to be localized, spatial variance
in these data indicate this may be an important tool in detecting
infection. This pilot study demonstrates that colony air filtration has
strong potential for the rapid screening of honey bee health and for the
study of bee behaviour.