# The honeybee gut microbiome: a novel multidimensional model of antimicrobial resistance transmission and immune homeostasis from environmental interactions to health regulation

## TL;DR

This review highlights how the honeybee gut microbiome helps understand antimicrobial resistance and immune balance, offering insights for health and environmental solutions.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a multidimensional framework linking environment, microbiota, and host health in honeybees for studying antimicrobial resistance.

## Key findings

- The honeybee gut microbiome maintains colony immune homeostasis and drives host co-evolution.
- It provides a framework for ecological containment of antimicrobial resistance and microbiome-based interventions.
- The model supports understanding resistance transmission and environmental adaptation in social insects.

## Abstract

The honeybee gut microbiome has emerged as a model system in microbial ecology, valued for its structural stability and host specificity, and has garnered significant attention for elucidating universal principles of host–microbe interactions. This review advocates for the honeybee as a multidisciplinary model organism, highlighting the unique role of its gut microbiota in maintaining colony immune homeostasis, driving host co-evolution, unraveling the transmission mechanisms of antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs), and enhancing host adaptability to environmental stressors. By integrating multidimensional factors, including environmental gradients and apicultural practices, we construct an “Environment–Microbiota–Host Health” interaction framework to transcend the limitations of single-factor analyses. This framework provides a novel paradigm for the ecological containment of antimicrobial resistance, the conservation of pollinator resources, and microbiome-based engineering interventions. The review underscores the unique value of the honeybee model in unraveling social insect-microbe coevolution and resistance transmission dynamics, while also prospecting its application potential in developing novel antimicrobial peptides, designing probiotic formulations, and monitoring environmental resistance.

This review establishes the honey bee gut microbiome as an integrative model system, synthesising its pivotal role in antimicrobial resistance dissemination through specialised plasmid evolution, strain-level immune specificity, and environmental adaptation, thereby bridging fundamental microbial ecology with actionable One Health solutions.