Open a honey bee hive on a warm afternoon and the first thing you’ll notice is movement.

Thousands of bees stream across the frames, tending brood, processing nectar and pollen, building wax, and maintaining the colony. A constant hum of activity and the smell of honey fill the air.

But this bustling environment is also home to something much smaller: a vast community of bacteria and fungi.

Some are harmless. Some are essential. Others can cause serious disease.

For honey bees, living together in such dense numbers creates an obvious problem. An infection that enters a colony has tens of thousands of potential hosts. Yet healthy honey bee colonies are remarkably good at keeping harmful microbes under control. How do they do it?

Our new research, published in ISME Communications, suggests that part of the answer lies in the way the hive is organised.

Mapping the hive’s defences

To understand how a colony keeps microbes under control, we first need to look at the hive as a whole.

The hive is not one place. Thousands of hexagonal wax cells are packed into combs, serving as nurseries, pantries, and storerooms.

At the centre is the brood, tended by nurse bees. Beyond it are........

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