Crithidia mellificae. The broad scope of our microarray platform enabled identification of an unexpected microbe, Crithidia mellificae, in our time-course samples ( Figure 6 ). Given that Crithidia bombi is a bumble bee pathogen and trypanosomatids were previously described in honey bees [9, 66, 67] , 5 unique oligonucleotides each from Crithidia oncopelti and C. fasciculata rRNA sequences were included on the microarray. Oligonucleotides from these two distantly related organisms were predicted to hybridize to all other Crithidia species with published sequence [53] . Three oligonucleotides and their reverse complements derived from Crithidia oncopelti were repeatedly detected in samples throughout the time-course. Pilot Sanger sequencing of randomly amplified genomic DNA from a honey bee intestinal sample yielded a 121 base-pair (bp) stretch of the kinetoplast minicircle with 74% homology to the Crithidia fasciculata kinetoplast (BlastN evalue = 3.5610 28 ). Specific PCR retrieved 593 nt of the GAPDH gene to confirm phylogenetic placement [68] .