2023-10-01 04:00:18
A carpenter bee (“Ceratina calcarata”) forages on a flower, in Canada, in August 2021. ISTOCKPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES
Bees are a hive of clichés, as deceptive as they seem familiar. Let’s draw at random: they live in large colonies, gathered around a queen, produce honey and sport a magnificent yellow and black striped fleece. All this is true ofApis mellifera, our good European bee. But as soon as we move away from this semi-domestic heroine and her twenty-eight subspecies, all our certainties collapse. Among the approximately 20,000 species of wild bees, very few combine even two of the four characteristics previously stated.
The little carpenter bee has none. No queen, no stripes and almost no hair. No honey, no hive. Solitary, it digs its nest in the dead stems of raspberries, rose bushes, clover and sumac, not shying away from human presence. It is in her garden that the biologist Sandra Rehan, lecturer at York University in Toronto, studied Ceratina limestone for the first time twenty years ago. “I started by raising young, monitoring sexual distribution and maternal investment. I ended up deciphering its genome and combining my interests in animal behavior and molecular genetics”she says.
In an article published on September 14 in the journal Communications Biology, the researcher and her team detail for the first time how the maternal care provided by the small insect (8 millimeters, half of a honey bee, a tenth of a large bumblebee) influences the future of its offspring, both in terms of the expression of its genes, the production of its microbiota and its general health. Such links have already been examined in many species, from birds to mice and humans. But Sandra Rehan and her colleagues followed the processes at all stages of their two months of development: nineteen stages in all, grouped into four main periods, early larval, advanced larval, pupal and juvenile.
No collective defense mechanism
By comparing litters groomed by their mothers to others left to their fate, researchers were able to see the effects of care at all stages. “We expected it, said the researcher. But we were stunned by the magnitude of the consequences in the early larval stage. » The researchers thus highlighted major changes in the expression of certain genes, which they then associated with the explosion of pathogens in the microbiota of the larvae. They found bacteria there, but above all, 85%, fungi. The most frequently encountered, Aspergellus also feared among domestic bees. “If the mothers are not there to clean them, the infected larvae are mummified”, says Sandra Rehan. Other pathogens cause abnormalities in eye or brain development.
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