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The composition of viral communities (i.e. viromes) can be dynamic and complex. Co-evolution may lead to virome host-specificity. However, eco-evolutionary factors may influence virome dynamics in wild host communities, potentially leading to disease emergence. Social bees are relevant models to address the drivers of virome composition: these important pollinators form multi-species assemblages, with high niche overlap and strong seasonality in their biotic interactions. We applied a microbial community approach to disentangle the role of host phylogeny and host ecology in shaping bee viromes, combining plant-pollinator networks with meta-transcriptomics, and small interfering RNAs as proxies for viral replication in pollinators and pollen. We identified over a hundred insect and plant viral sequences from ca. 4500 insect pollinator samples across three time points in one year. While host genetic distance drives the distribution of bee viruses, we find that plant-pollinator interactions and phenology drive plant virus communities collected by bees. This reveals the opportunities for virus spread in the bee assemblage. However, we show that transmission to multiple hosts is only realized for a fraction of insect viruses, with even fewer found to be actively replicating in multiple species, including the particularly virulent multi-host acute bee paralysis virus.
Doublet et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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