Animals often harbor specialized gut microbial communities, exerting significant physiological and metabolic influences on their hosts. However, studying mechanisms underlying microbiota-host interactions is challenging due to the complex and often inaccessible biology of gut microbial communities and their animal hosts.

Honeybees offer fantastic opportunities to identify mechanisms underlying microbiota-host interactions, as they harbor relatively simple and experimentally tractable gut bacterial communities. In my talk, I will present recent findings from gnotobiotic bee experiments showing how we probe and dissect different types of symbiotic interactions in this model including effects of the microbiota on the host, effects of the host on the microbiota, and antagonistic interactions among different microbiota members.