Pillar 2
Adaptation & Biological Interactions
Understanding the capacities and constraints that shape ecological function
Honey bees provide an exceptional model for understanding how evolution generates biological function. Their broad geographic distributions, repeated adaptation to contrasting environments, complex social organization and specialized microbial symbioses allow us to investigate biological processes across multiple levels of organization, from genes and physiology to colonies and ecological interactions.
These naturally diversified lineages create evolutionary experiments that cannot be reproduced in the laboratory. Closely related populations have independently encountered different climates, floral resources and environmental pressures, allowing us to identify the genetic changes associated with adaptation and determine how those changes alter physiology, behaviour and interactions with both nestmates and microbial partners.
Using honey bees as this integrated model system, our research addresses four fundamental questions:
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How does evolution generate biological diversity?
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How do organisms adapt to changing environments?
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How do interactions among individuals and microbial partners shape adaptation?
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How are these evolutionary processes being reshaped by human activities?
These studies connect evolutionary diversification with the biological mechanisms that determine how organisms function and ultimately interact with their environments.
What determines the capacity of organisms to respond to environmental change and perform their ecological functions?
01
Evolution provides the reference against which every biological mechanism is interpreted. Population genomics reconstructs how honey bee lineages diversified across Asia, identifies independent evolutionary units and reveals repeated adaptive responses to different environments. This framework allows us to distinguish ancestral traits from repeated innovations and provides the foundation for studying adaptation, social behaviour and host–microbiota interactions.
02
Independent colonization of temperate and high-altitude environments reveals how evolution repeatedly solves similar environmental challenges. Our work shows that cold adaptation emerges through multiple biological layers, including mitochondrial thermogenesis, pigmentation, behavioural regulation and microbial metabolism, rather than through any single "cold-adaptation gene."
03
Environmental adaptation ultimately benefits the colony rather than individual workers alone. Larval pheromones, neuroendocrine signalling and worker physiology coordinate resource allocation across thousands of individuals, allowing colonies to adjust foraging behaviour and nutritional investment as environmental conditions change. This work provides the mechanistic explanation for why Lkr became one of the most consistently selected genes during honey bee evolution.
04
Honey bee adaptation extends beyond the host genome. Specialized gut microbes regulate metabolism, immunity, nutrient utilization and thermal performance through reciprocal interactions with the host. These studies reveal that adaptive capacity emerges from cooperation between host and microbial genomes rather than from either partner alone.
05
Modern environmental change is now redirecting the evolutionary trajectories of both honey bees and their microbial partners. Museum genomics provides historical baselines that reveal genetic erosion, recent adaptive responses to pesticides and parallel changes in microbial evolution. These discoveries raise a new question: how will anthropogenic evolution influence the future ecological functions of pollinators?
Biological capacity emerges from interacting systems
A central concept emerging from this research is that organismal phenotype is not determined by the genome alone. It emerges through interactions among evolutionary history, genomic architecture, environmental conditions, social partners and microbial symbionts. Evolution therefore provides more than a record of past diversification—it establishes the framework for understanding how organisms function, how they respond to environmental change and how those responses ultimately influence ecological interactions.