Researchers enlisted a new kind of helper, the bee, to monitor the microbiomes of cities around the world. According to a recently published analysis, debris that collects at the bottom of hives can reveal a lot about what is happening in urban environments.
Cities have microbiomes, just like our guts. A microbiome is a complex of different types of microorganisms that thrive in an environment. And just as analyzing the microbiome in our gut can reveal important details about our physical condition, doing the same with the urban microbiome reveals what kinds of fungi, It can reveal data about how bacteria and other small organisms coexist with human city dwellers.
While it is possible to use human researchers to collect data on urban microbiomes, such field studies can be costly, labor-intensive, and time-consuming. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Pratt Institute, and Weill Cornell Medicine decided to enlist the help of honeybees, insects that are already spending their days flying between cities around the world.
Because honeybees can forage within 2 miles (3 km) of their hives every day, researchers felt they could be a good stand-in for human field researchers. When the bees return from their hard days on the streets, they leave small debris at the bottom of their hives.By analyzing this debris, the researchers revealed some interesting details.
In a pilot study using three rooftop hives in Brooklyn, New York, researchers took hive swabs and examined honey, bee corpses, and hive debris to see which provided the richest data source. I checked. Debris provided the richest dataset, so the next step was to analyze debris from beehives around the world.
The team found that in each city they investigated, different genetic signatures were found in the honeycomb debris. In Sydney, for example, genetic material from rubber-degrading bacteria was detected in samples, while in Melbourne, which is a bit more environmentally friendly, significant amounts of genetic material from eucalyptus were found in the bottoms of hives. Analysis of the Venice hive revealed that his DNA in wood rot and fungi associated with date palms dominated the debris.
Analysis of Tokyo beehives not only found the DNA of the yeast that ferments soy sauce, rickettsia felis, is a pathogen that spreads from cats to humans, causing a condition commonly known as cat-scratch fever. The findings led the team to believe that using bees to monitor urban environments is a promising way to track the spread of human diseases, although the current findings are inconclusive. It is too preliminary to draw any conclusions.
“The most surprising thing for us is collecting microbial information not only from the plants that bees come into contact with, but also from the microbial clouds they pass through, associated with other environments and organisms,” said the first author. NYU’s Elizabeth Henaff said about the study. “This research is important in understanding how we design environments built to host a wide variety of cities.”
Additional analysis of hive debris also provided information on microbes that could affect bee health. In some hives, scientists found some microbes whose presence indicated a healthy hive, while in others they found pathogens that indicated the opposite, and bee debris analysis showed that the hives were healthy. points to the fact that it may be a good way to measure the state of
A study was published in a journal environmental microbiome.
Source: New York University
