Research on A. mellifera showed that the larvae and new emerged bees had few or no bacteria in their guts (Martinson et al., 2012), which is consistent with our similar results for A. cerana. Our results suggest that quantities of the four bacteria in the A. cerana gut initially increases in adult workers from day 5 then later declines and remains stable for the rest of the time. Similar results have been reported in bumble bees (Xu et al., 2014).