Antibiotics hurt bee gut and survival

Tetracycline shrinks the honeybee gut microbiome and elevates mortality after hive return.

Source

Antibiotic exposure perturbs the gut microbiota and elevates mortality in honeybees

Raymann K, Shaffer Z, Moran NA · PLoS biology · 2017

Study at a glance

Design: Animal / in-vitro — Worker honeybees fed tetracycline; 16S community and survival vs germ-free controls
N: Cup cages of 30 bees × 15 replicates per condition; 16S profiles n≈14–15 per arm — no single primary N
Population: Worker honeybees with conventional or germ-free guts
Outcome: Core gut microbiota disruption and mortality after tetracycline

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Antibiotics hurt bee gut and survival

These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.

Eight core bacterial species in honeybee gut.

Of eight core bacterial species found in the honeybee gut [], four were significantly affected by tetracycline treatment.

Core species comprise 95%–99% of gut bacteria.

eight core bacterial species, which comprise 95%–99% of bacteria in the gut [,].

What they did

Fed worker bees tetracycline, quantified 16S community size/composition, and tracked survival in hive vs lab recovery conditions.

Four of eight core gut species dropped; elevated mortality in treated bees; germ-free bees did not show the same antibiotic mortality spike.

The limits

Does not test every antibiotic class or all hive stressors.

Key terms

Core gut microbiome: Stable set of bee gut bacterial species.
Tetracycline: Antibiotic used in beekeeping contexts.
Dysbiosis: Disrupted microbial community state.
Opportunistic pathogen: Microbe that infects when microbiota/host defenses weaken.
qPCR: Quantitative PCR of bacterial load.
Germ-free bees: Bees lacking normal gut microbiota.

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Core species:

Common questions

Core species count?

Eight.

How many core taxa hit?

Four significantly affected.

Antibiotic?

Tetracycline.

Germ-free contrast?

No antibiotic mortality increase without microbiota.