I have a confession to make.
I am hopelessly and desperately in love...
with honey!
Honey is the perfect additive to my peanut butter sandwiches
that bring them to the next level!
But in order to get honey, we need honeybees!
Unfortunately for everyone honeybees are
not doing so well right now.
There are a huge number of known and unknown factors
making bees ride the strugglebus, but
researchers from the University of Texas recently
published a paper highlighting just one more way
bees are getting the short stick, and it has to do
with antibiotics.
One awful disease that bee colonies have to deal with is called
American Foulbrood. This disease is caused
by a bacteria that eats bee larvea before they can
hatch into new bees, and
it's found almost everywhere in the world!
One way that beekeepers stop Foulbrood is by
treating with the antibiotic tetracycline.
The paper we're talking about today took a look at what
this antibiotic is doing to the honeybee gut bacteria or its microbiota.
Spoiler Alert! It's not good for the bees.
It turns out that honeybees are actually really great for
studying the effects of antibiotics on the microbiota for a couple reasons.
The first is that the honeybee microbiota is surprisingly
similar to the human one.
They get their gut bacteria from each other rather than
through the environment. Just like we do!
Also, the bacteria in their gut are only found there and
not anywhere else. Just like the special bacteria that we have in our gut.
But the second and more important reason is that
they are MUCH simpler.
While anywhere from 500-1,000 bacterial species can
live in the human gut. Most of the honeybee bacteria is
from only 8 species!
That's like the difference between planning a small dinner party
versus planning a massive wedding!
One of those things is much easier.
So how is the antibiotic tetracycline affecting the bees?
Bees from the same hive that haven't been treated with anitbiotics
have pretty similar microbiota, but bees treated with tetracycline
show five times less bacteria in their gut, and
they show less gut diversity overall.
Of the eight core bacterial species in the bees,
4 are affected directly by tetracycline and
the others show effects based on the shifting gut population.
So what all of these changes mean for the bees?
Well, it turns out that having a healthy and diverse
microbiota is key to protecting you from infections.
To find this out, these researchers took antibiotic treated
bees and normal bees from the same hive and
exposed them to a bacteria called Serratia that is
normally found in bees.
Usually this bacteria isn't harmful, but when the bees are sick...
it can cause what's called an opportunistic infection.
Serratia is in the same family as E coli and Salmonella.
Neither group of bees were cool with being infected, but
about 70% of the tetracycline treated bees died after five days
whereas only about 25% of the untreated bees died.
So while antibiotics do protect the bees from Foulbrood...
antibiotic treatment seems to leave the bees primed
for other infections.
like how you always seem to get sick when you're really stressed out!
The antibiotic effect isn't the only reason that bees
are having a tough time right now, but it is one of the
factors that we should consider if we want to keep them
happy and healthy for the future!
Plus by doing these kinds of studies, we're learning
more about how antibiotics affect gut microbiota, and
that applies to humans too!
So yeah, bees make honey.
But they can also tell us so much more.
Thank you so much for watching this video!
I hope you enjoyed it!
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