Hi all

The flexible lifespan of honey bees as well as other social Hymenoptera has caught the eye of researchers studying aging. If aging can be externally controlled, this is a matter of extreme interest to scientists and the rest of us as well. Not that I want to  live to be 120, or like that...

Social insects capture the imagination because of their
organisation, their division of labour and the fact that
through force of numbers, small creatures can achieve
impressive cooperative feats of engineering. Something
that is under-appreciated is that they also provide an ideal
system to study the mechanisms of ageing. The evolution
of morphologically or behaviourally specialised castes is
associated with great variation in lifespan, despite the fact
that different castes can arise from the same genome.

Queens (the reproductive caste) have been recorded to
live as long as 29 years, making them the longest-lived
adult insects that we know of. Workers (which engage in
nest maintenance and brood care) are substantially less
long-lived even in laboratory conditions where they
are protected from extrinsic sources of mortality such as
predation. Furthermore, variation in lifespan also exists
among worker castes that specialise in different tasks. 

When investigating the effect of age in social insects, it is
important to consider that in many species workers
undergo an age-related transition in behavioural caste,
from a stage where they predominantly stay in the nest to
care for the queen and brood, to foraging where they leave
the nest to collect resources. Care must therefore
be taken not confuse the effects of age and behavioural
caste on the trait of interest.

Lucas, E. R., & Keller, L. (2014). 
Ageing and somatic maintenance in social insects. 
Current Opinion in Insect Science, 5, 31-36.

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