Ryans Mres explored the population genetics of bumblebees in the UK and here he presents his findings at the 55th Population Genetics Group (popgroup) conference. Despite the nerves, Ryan did a great job presenting at his first conference and a recording is available to view here;

More flowers and pollinator diversity could help protect bees from parasites

Press release by Hayley Dunning on a recent publication

Having more flowers and maintaining diverse bee communities could help reduce the spread of bee parasites, according to a new study.

The research, conducted on more than 5,000 flowers and bees, reveals how bee parasites spread and what measures could help control them.

Bees can be infected with a cocktail of parasites that can cause a range of symptoms from reduced foraging ability to dysentery and death. Though parasites contribute to bee declines, scientists are unsure how they spread between bee species.

“It’s a little like if subway cars are sites of transmission between humans – if there are more subway cars, there are less people in each and less chance for transmission.” Dr Peter Graystock

Flowers are essential for bee health, but may also act as transmission hubs for bee diseases. Over a growing season the diversity and abundance of bees and flowers change but little is known about how this may be linked to the risk of parasite transmission.

The new study, published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, suggests having more flowers and a more diverse bee community could help dilute the load of parasites, and that this may be particularly important in areas with high densities of social bees, such as honeybees and bumblebees.

Most studies of bee parasites focus on social bee species that often live in farmed colonies. Little is therefore known about the interactions between parasites and wild solitary bee species, or how parasites are transferred between them. The team behind the new paper studied how parasites are spread across diverse bee and flower communities, including solitary bee species.

More flowers and diverse bee species

Lead author Dr Peter Graystock, who completed the work at Cornell University and now works in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, said: “We found that when bee communities are at their most diverse, the proportion of infected bees were at their lowest; and when flowers were at their most abundant, fewer were likely to be acting as transmission hubs.

“There are two things potentially occurring here. In diverse bee communities, parasites are more likely to end up in a species they are not compatible with, meaning they can’t replicate and spread further. The second thing is by having more flowers, bees aren’t all visiting and contaminating the same few flowers with high concentrations of parasites.

“It’s a little like if subway cars are sites of transmission between humans – if there are more subway cars, there are less people in each and less chance for transmission. Furthermore if some of the ‘people’ riding the subway cars were different animal species that were not susceptible to the parasite, that too reduces the risk of transmission.”

The team screened more than 5,000 wildflowers and bees across a 24-week growing season, capturing changes as different flowers bloomed and different species of bee dominated.

Over 110 bee species and 89 flower species were screened, revealing 42% of bee species (12.2% individual bees) and 70% of flower species (8.7% individual flowers) had at least one parasite in or on them.

Bees had the highest prevalence of parasites late in the season, when social bees formed the majority of screened bees and overall bee diversity was lowest. This suggests keeping bee diversity high, with a variety of social and solitary species present, could help reduce the spread of parasites.

Since social bees are likely to come from farmed colonies, the researchers also say their research points to the importance of keeping hives healthy, to avoid infecting wild bees.

Favourite flowers

The study is the first time researchers have screened wildflowers and bees for parasites over the season, and as well as the abundance of flowers affecting transmission, the team also found that the species of flowers played a role.

For example, the species Lychnis flos-cuculi, commonly known as ‘ragged robin’, often had multiple parasite species on them, whereas Lythrum salicaria, or ‘purple loosestrife’ had few.

Dr Graystock added: “The power of this study is the number of bees and flowers screened over time, allowing us to see if the patterns fit with parasite transmission theory. We next want to dig deeper and understand some of the underlying mechanisms – such as why some flowers are more likely to harbour parasites than others.”

The work was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health in the US.

To read more, please read the article;

‘Dominant bee species and floral abundance drive parasite temporal dynamics in plant-pollinator communities’ by Peter Graystock, Wee Hao Ng, Kyle Parks, Amber D. Tripodi, Paige A. Muñiz, Ashley A. Fersch, Christopher R. Myers, Quinn S. McFrederick and Scott H. McArt is published in Nature Ecology and Evolution.

I am advertising a fully funded PhD to work with me, Dr Richard Gill, and Dr Sophie Evison on one of the most damaging bee parasites.

Project Description

Understanding the factors placing insect pollinators at risk is a research priority with our future food security reliant on the health of these important organisms. Bees are vital insect pollinators, making the high rates of colony losses observed in recent years a global issue. Whilst we know the drivers of bee losses are multifactorial, such as disease, pesticides, and land use change, we fall short of understanding how these three stressors interact. Indeed, a major challenge in host-parasite ecology is understanding the context-dependence of disease dynamics, and how disease severity is altered by multiple interacting stressors.

This studentship will focus on honeybees and one of the most destructive diseases they experience: European foul brood (EFB). This globally distributed disease causes significant damage to the beekeeping industry, and in the UK, EFB is one of only two microbial bee diseases considered so harmful that positive detection requires immediate notification to the authorities. Severe cases of the disease often result in the destruction/burning of the hive to prevent further spread. Yet despite the impact this disease can have, we currently have little understanding as to how additional stressors influence the severity and spread of this disease, nor the ultimate influence this has on honey bee health.

The student will explore the mechanism behind transmission of the causal bacteria of the disease (Melissococcus plutonius), before determining if key stressors (Land and pesticide use) influence the severity of the disease. Thanks to generous funding from CB Dennis British Beekeepers Research Trust and Bee Diseases Insurance Ltd, this directly-funded studentship will employ a suite of cutting-edge scientific techniques to address questions on what modulates the transmission and virulence of this disease. The project will add substantially to our understanding of the vulnerability of bees to this significantly destructive disease and the results will facilitate the formation of evidence-led disease management strategies.

The student will gain a set of interdisciplinary skills including field work, next generation DNA sequencing and bioinformatics, pesticide residue analysis, microbiology and honeybee keeping. The student will gain training and collaboration from leading scientists including supervisor Dr Peter Graystock (Imperial College London), Dr Richard Gill (Imperial College London), and Dr Sophie Evison (University of Nottingham), plus assistance from the National Bee Unit/Defra. Based at the Silwood Park campus, the student will join the world leading university of Imperial College and benefit from being surrounded by top researchers in the disciplines of ecology, evolution and conservation. Facilities include >100 hectares of field site, new controlled environment rooms, microbiology facility, labs tailored for bee research and spacious workspace.

How to apply

Please send your CV, a one page cover letter explaining why you are suitable for this project, and the names and e-mail addresses of two referees to Dr Peter Graystock p.graystock@imperial.ac.uk by 13th January 2020.

Informal enquiries are welcomed and should be sent to Dr Peter Graystock p.graystock@imperial.ac.uk

Student eligibility

The studentship is funded by the CB Dennis British Beekeepers Research Trust and Bee Diseases Insurance Ltd. Applicants should have a BSc degree at 2.1 or higher in Biology, Ecology, Microbiology or similar and to hold, or be about to obtain, a Masters degree. Exceptional students at Bachelors level without a Masters will also be considered. The project will start in September 2020.

Funding Notes

The studentship covers a stipend for 3 years at current research council rates of £17,009 per year tax free, and tuition fees for UK and EU citizens.

Also advertised here: https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/the-context-dependence-of-disease-spread-and-virulence-in-a-pollinator-system/?p114278

Over the coming months we will be increasing our focus on insect cognition thanks to funding from the British Ecological Society! If you are a student interested in this field and are looking for a project based at Silwood, please get in touch – we have lots of cool projects!

I’m excited to announce that I have started my new position at Imperial College London (Silwood Park campus)! Over the coming years I will be looking at the role of the microbiome in bee health. This will include a range of topics from microbiome transmission and diversity, to the functional role of the microbiome and how me may engineer bespoke microbiomes.

I will be working closely with the Gill lab in addition to Tim Barraclough and Tom Bell.

Keep checking back for opportunities to work in the lab!

Today I was honoured to have been one of 4 experts invited to the panel of the 2018 Liberty Hyde Bailey Lecture at Cornell University. Together with Dr Scott McArt, Dr Phoebe Koenig, and Hailey Scofield we discussed the health of pollinators, current research in the field and future directions.

It was a lively talk and discussion which was both well attended and streamed live! The audience were mostly Cornel Alumni from a diverse range of fields which encouraged a broad range of discussion and lots of interested faces and interesting questions!

Today was the joint pollinator symposium between Cornell University and Pennsylvania State University, based at PSU. It’s my first visit to PSU which is a great university that in addition to hosting some awesome scientists, seems to benefit from an earlier emergence of spring and we got to sit outside and see the odd bumblebee in flight which is still rare in Ithaca at the moment!

The symposium was great and lovely to mix with everyone that’s part of the pollinator groups at PSU. It was good to present some of the EEID project findings and get feedback. It’s actually looking like quite a few people are not looking at the role of flowers as transmission hubs for pollinator parasites which is really neat! I look forward to hearing more and seeing how this topic develops!

BOMBUSS was conceived, and its inaugural meeting planned, by Jamie Strange (USDA-ARS), Amber Tripodi (USDA-ARS), Neal Williams (UC-Davis) and Hollis Woodard (UC-Riverside). Funding to support the meeting was obtained through a grant from the USDA-National Institute of Food and Agriculture to J. Strange and A. Tripodi and supplemental funding was provided by the USDA-ARS-National Program Staff Professional Activities Fund.

The BOMBUSS brought bumblebee researchers together to discuss the methodologies currently used to investigate these important pollinators. As domestication of bumble bees has expanded worldwide, so has research on this group of bees as model organisms for study, as crop pollinators, and as conservation targets. The growth of this field of study has been rapid, prompting the need to convene this meeting to discuss the need and potential for standardization of methods.

I thought it was a very productive meeting with many future collaborations set out! There was a great interchange of ideas and methods and several plans to publish the standardised methods we discussed. Maybe there will be a Bombuss 2? I hope so!

One of the collaborations i made with artists from the cross-pollination project has come to fruition, and its amazing!! The networking project aims to bring Art and Science together, producing creative art projects that explore and promote the crisis facing pollinators and to influence policy decision making.This particular artwork is a collaboration between the artist Dr Tyra Oseng-Rees and supporting artist Carly Wilshere-Butler from Swansea College of Art at UWTSD, myself , and Sinead Lynch from Bumblebees Conservation Trust.

Six different types of bumblebees has been made out of recycled bottle glass and is currently exhibited at the National Botanic Garden, Wales until the end of August 2017 before the exhibition will be moved to Dr Beynon’s Bug Farm in Pembrokeshire. Different bumblebees have been made using a combination of fused recycled glass and enamelled mild steel and wiring. The recycled glass has been collected form waste bottles, subsequently cleaned and crushed into a fine small grained cullet before moulded around a hand-crafted model of a bumblebee and fired in a kiln.

The Bumblebees made are:
White- tailed bumblebee, male Bombus lucorum
Common carder bee, female Bombus pascuorum
Red-tailed bumblebee, maleBombus lapidarius
Tree bumblebee, female Bombus hypnorum
Red-tailed cuckoo bumblebee, female Bombus rupestris
Gypsy cuckoo bumblebee, femaleBombus bohemicus

Learn more about the recycled glass bees and the project here: https://www.osengreesreflection.com/projects/#/recycled-glass-bumblebees/ 

Today my role on the NIH funded project on Ecological Emerging Infectious Diseases (EEID), moves to Cornell university. Based in Dr Scott McArts Lab, i will be leading the considerable molecular work on this $2 million NIH grant that takes a trait based approach to understanding the  spread of infectious microbial parasites in wild bees.

As I mentioned in the earlier post upon receiving the funding, this is a large collaborative project and my hope is that it will make large strides in helping us understand the drivers of parasite spread in bees, and therefore let us identify ways to reduce parasite spread.

One of the first things i’m doing is collecting wild flowers and bees and observing pollinator behaviour within the complex flower-pollinator networks at the sample sites.

Here, I look at the microbiomes in wild and managed bees. Microbiomes are the communities of microbes that live in the digestive tract of bees. We believe many of these microbes provide benefits to the host bee; and honey bees in particular are known to have a consistent community of microbes. However, research of the honey bee microbiome can only provide limited insight into wild bees. By looking at the microbiomes in the closely related Ceratina bees and distantly related Megalopta we examine how different the microbiomes are between different bees. We then look to see if the microbes found in the bee collected pollen is similar to the microbiomes.

This is particularly interesting in the Ceratina pollen which is provisioned in brood cells in sequence so we could link it to its time since being regurgitated by the bee

Unlike honey bees, whose gut microbial community differs compared to their pollen, Ceratina adults and pollen largely share a similar microbial composition. This suggests the environmental transmission of microbes from flowers is likely to be important for wild bees like Ceratina who do not benefit from social transmission like honeybees do. We go on to discuss the consequences of diversity in core microbiota between bee genera and their associations with pollen in relation to identifying potentially beneficial microbial taxa in wild bees to aid the conservation of wild, understudied, non- model bee species.

click here to learn more from this study