Hive product metagenomics: a promising window into honey bee genomics and bee-associated ecosystems

Julie Birgel, Kamila Canale-Tabet, Thibault Leroy 

Through their pollination services, bees are essential components of ecosystem functioning, supporting biodiversity and contributing to global food production. Among them, honey bees are particularly important, both for their ecological role and their widespread contribution to many agricultural systems and beekeeping. Honey, beeswax and propolis, among other beehive products, have played a central role in human societies for millenia and remain highly valued for their societal and economic importance, as well as their growing scientific interest. In this Perspectives article, we explore the largely untapped potential of these beehive products for studying honey bee genomics and characterizing honey bee-associated ecosystems through metagenomic approaches. We organized these ideas along a temporal perspective, illustrating how hive products can serve both as biological archives of past biodiversity and as genomic and metagenomic matrices for monitoring future ecosystem changes. We discuss how these materials can provide unprecedented access to fundamental knowledge across time and space, thereby opening new avenues for reconstructing history of bee populations and biodiversity, characterizing species interactions and investigating the ecological complexity surrounding honey bee colonies. We hypothesise that applying metagenomics to beehive products could help address current challenges in the beekeeping sector, including bee health monitoring, assessing ecotoxicological impacts and other major human-driven pressures on bees and their environments, evaluation the effects of agricultural practices on biodiversity, and detecting fraud in the beehive-product market. Finally, we argue that genomic and metagenomic analyses of hive products open up promising avenues for otherwise difficult-to-access research in honey bee genomics, ecology and evolution.