Putting our honey bee data in context
Our group recently addressed the effect of within-colony genetic diversity on the associated microbial community of the honeybee Apis melliera [ 1 ] . We obtained more than 70,000 pyrosequences from samples of whole worker bees, worker guts, and from bee bread taken from 22 colonies (n= 12 colonies were genetically diverse; n=10 colonies were genetically uniform). Our research found that the honey bee colonies benefit from the promiscuous mating of queens; diverse colonies were characterized by a reduction in potential pathogens and enrichment for possible probiotic species. We used well established approaches for clustering (based on 97% sequence identity using average neighbor) and de novo classifying short pyrosequences [ 2-5 ] as these sequences are arguably too short for robust phylogenetic analyses [ 6 ] . Our approach used the Naïve Bayesian Classifier trained on the Arb-Silva dataset and targeted diversity in the V1-V2 region. The utility of this approach is that we cou