Community Analysis and Bee Guts: A Very Hampshire Collaboration Between Faculty and Students
Science professors Juliet Johnson and Jennifer VanWyk worked with each other and with a class conducting research on the gut health of bumblebees, vital pollinators that are sensitive to the effects of climate change.
The result was their article “Hot and Bothered, Bee Guts’ Microbiome Shifts Under Thermal Stress and Pathogen Infection,” currently in peer review. Students in Assistant Professor of Environmental Microbiology and Bioremediation Juliet Johnston’s spring 2025 course Bioinformatics: Community Analysis are listed as the paper’s coauthors. Johnston spoke with us about how the collaboration came to be.
How did the bee gut health project start?
Jenny [assistant professor of ecology and global change] and I got hired at the same time and really wanted to collaborate. Because my bioinformatics skills are easily transferred onto new environments, even bee guts, this project idea just made sense. Jenny had a grant that would support us doing this work.
What did the research entail?
Jenny organized a bunch of students to help set up all the bees in their microcolonies and feed them a potential parasite. Over the next two weeks, Jenny and I took care of the bees in my lab space in the Cole Science Center. Then, students in my Bioinformatics: Community Analysis class helped with DNA extraction of the bee guts and they were sequenced on a small portable DNA sequencer, the Oxford Nanopore MK1D. All of the students who successfully completed my Bioinformatics course are coauthors, as they did the preliminary investigation on the bee gut microbiome.
What do the findings indicate?
There are distinct trends in the bee gut microbiome based on which type(s) of stressors are impacting bees. Overwhelmingly, any stress causes an increase in lactic acid bacteria but there are subtle differences in specific species of lactic acid bacteria, based on thermal stress and/or parasitic infection.
What is special or unusual about community analysis?
Community analysis is fantastic because it’s widely applicable. My course contextualizes it with microbiome studies, but the same analysis could be used for any ecological setting — with plants, insects, birds, mammals, and so on. It’s how we use math and statistics to quantifiably state two environments that are different or similar.
Will members of the Community Analysis class be coauthoring papers in the future?
This coming year, my Community Analysis course will use new data from a project sponsored by the American Society for Engineering Education Engineering One Planet: They’ll look at the differences in plants and soil microbiomes fed with graywater. The R.W. Kern Center and the Hitchcock Center for the Environment both have graywater systems that deliver nutritious, not terribly “dirty” water onto small constructed wetlands. We want to know how the biotic (living) and abiotic (nonliving) factors of this graywater impact the soil microbiome and chemistry. My General Chemistry class’s final project involves the soil chemistry.
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