Not just honey bee queens but the queens of other social insects live a very long time. Queens of ants and termites have been reported to live for 20 to 30 years. Naturally this fact has intrigued folks for years. If there is some way to increase normal life span so drastically, we want to know what it is. On the other hand, it appears more likely that the lower castes in these societies are induced to die off as they are being replaced. In this way there is always a supply of young workers to  protect the queen (or queens) and their nest.

> The enormous intraspecific variation of lifespan inevolutionary theories of ageing. In weaver ants, large workers engaging in risky foraging have a higher ageing rate than small workers that preferentially perform tasks inside the colony (Chapuisat & Keller, 2002). Similarly, the reproductives of social insects, which live in the relative safety of their nests and are sheltered from predation or pathogens, outlive most solitary insects and live up to 28 times longer than their nonreproducing nest mates .

> In this study, we could clearly show that queens of Cardiocondyla obscurior lived significantly longer in experimental single- and two-queen colonies than in eight- queen colonies, despite of equal morphology, mode of colony founding and level of ‘extrinsic mortality’. Furthermore, queens from single- and two-queen colonies laid significantly more eggs per week than queens from 18-queen colonies.  Not a single queen of an 8-queen association reaches roughly the maximum lifespan of queens kept alone or together with one other queen.

Social influence on age and reproduction: reduced lifespan and fecundity in multi-queen ant colonies
J. EVOL. BIOL. 24 (2011) 1455–1461

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