Using museum collections to detect and quantify genomic introgression into wild bumblebees

Bumblebees provide fundamental ecological and economic services as wildflower and crop pollinators but reports suggest that their populations have been generally in decline for the past several decades.

At the same time, the amount of crops that require pollinators has increased dramatically, so the demand for commercial bumblebee hives has greatly increased in response. Unfortunately, these commercial bumblebees can then escape and hybdridize with the wild ones.

This has been suggested to have negative genetic consequences for wild populations, but so far such effects are largely unknown due to limitations in studying introgression such as the need for ‘pure’ samples collected before the introductions began in the late 80s.

In this project, I propose to circumvent these limitations by using the wealth of pollinator specimens housed in museum collections.

We will generate and compare genomic data from several hundred bumblebee specimens mostly collected in the last 150-years from different regions throughout Sweden, but also in other European countries as well as from commercial hives.

This will enable a detailed assessment of the timing and quantification of past events of genomic introgression from commercial into wild bumblebee populations and to identify whether signatures of adaptation to domestication are spreading into the wild bumblebee populations.