Bees make more friends when they’re full of healthy gut bacteria
The astonishing uniformity of this microbial ecosystem around the planet—similar in all species, including sociable bumblebees—indicates that the bacteria are essential to honeybee survival in some way. Since bees with healthy microbial partners develop into adults with more complicated social ties and even different brain chemistry than bees with sterile guts, research earlier this week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution may help to partially explain why. In many animals, the community of bacteria, fungi, and other microbes known as the gut biome has a potentially significant but mysterious function. Human cognition may even be shaped by it. According to Joanito Liberti, the paper's principal author and an evolutionary biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, "the gut-brain axis is particularly interesting from an evolutionary standpoint, because gut symbionts were probably there when the first neuronal systems formed." There are some indications ...