23 and bee: Molecular medicine for early and effective diagnostics and monitoring of honeybee health

Large-scale agriculture depends on insect pollination services valued at over £430 million annually in the UK: commercial pollination underpins the production of most major fruit and nut crops. Furthermore, insect pollinators ensure ecosystem stability, with 87% of flowering plants requiring pollination for reproduction. Honeybees provide most of this pollination. However, 15 to 40% of bee hives are lost every year.

This creates huge costs for beekeepers, and a major challenge for agroindustry. Diseases are the major culprit. Indeed, keeping colonies healthy and preventing pathogens infecting some colonies from spreading to others are ongoing challenges for large- and small-scale beekeepers. They thus regularly perform labour-intense check-ups of their hives - looking inside for characteristic symptoms of different diseases.

However, this is insufficient: visual diagnostics lack sensitivity or accuracy, or cannot identify multiple infections. Furthermore, treatments are difficult to dose or to monitor - they can worsen things.

Accurate early detection and monitoring of pathogens could significantly reduce the need for treatment, significantly reduce cross-infection, and thus significantly reduce colony losses.

Molecular medicine approaches that provide millions of measurements per sample - rather than the handful obtained through traditional approaches - have dramatically improved medical research and practise (Curtis et al 2014, Collins & Varmus 2015, Costello et al 2014). We aim to similarly harness such approaches to develop a new and sensitive approach for monitoring bee health.

We will develop and implement an approach that makes it possible for a beekeeper to post a bee for testing and rapidly obtain an overview of her molecular health. The resulting online "molecular health dashboard" for the bee will provide information including: Overviews of the pathogens and parasites (and their strains) present (e.g., Viruses, Nosema etc);

Overview of gut bacteria;

Overviews of physiological health based on comparison of the activity levels of 10,000 genes in 3 bee tissues to those of a broad sampling of healthy bees. This will indicate, for example, whether the bee is investing an abnormal amount of energy on immune- or detoxification functions.

We aim to provide a straightforward way of continuously monitoring colony health in a low-cost manner that requires little labour and that provides high-resolution insight on hive-health. This will provide a powerful tool for regular testing, replacing or directing traditional health evaluation approaches, making informed decisions regarding treatments and monitoring their efficacy.