ArticleAge (Dordrecht, Netherlands)2014
Reproduction, social behavior, and aging trajectories in honeybee workers.
Article in Age (Dordrecht, Netherlands), 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 37 citations in OpenAlex.
- From Plant Metabolites to Pollinator Safety: Rethinking Selectivity of Botanical Insecticides in Bees-A Review.Biology · 2026Review
- Inter-Caste Comparison Reveals a Unique Bioenergetic Signature in Long-Lived Ant Queens.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- The pace and shape of ant ageing.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- Post-Reproductive Lifespan in Honey Bee Workers with Varying Life Expectancies.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Worker Survival and Egg Production-But Not Transcriptional Activity-Respond to Queen Number in the Highly Polygynous, Invasive Ant Tapinoma magnum.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Advancing methods for the biodemography of aging within social contexts.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Queen loss increases worker survival in leaf-cutting ants under paraquat-induced oxidative stress.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Reproductive activation in honeybee (Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Comparative transcriptomics of social insect queen pheromones.Nature communications · 2019Article
- Group demography affects ant colony performance and individual speed of queen and worker aging.BMC evolutionary biology · 2017Article
- Evolution of ageing, costs of reproduction and the fecundity-longevity trade-off in eusocial insects.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Early life stress affects mortality rate more than social behavior, gene expression or oxidative damage in honey bee workers.Experimental gerontology · 2017Article
- Intrinsic worker mortality depends on behavioral caste and the queens' presence in a social insect.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2017Article
- Ties between ageing plasticity and reproductive physiology in honey bees (Apis mellifera) reveal a positive relation between fecundity and longevity as consequence of advanced social evolution.Current opinion in insect science · 2016Review
- Activity of telomerase and telomeric length in Apis mellifera.Chromosoma · 2016Article
- Intrinsic survival advantage of social insect queens depends on reproductive activation.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While a negative correlation between reproduction and life span is commonly observed, specialized reproductive individuals outlive their non-reproductive nestmates in all eusocial species, including the honeybee, Apis mellifera (L). The consequences of reproduction for individual life expectancy can be studied directly by comparing reproductive and non-reproductive workers. We quantified the life span consequences of reproduction in honeybee workers by removal of the queen to trigger worker reproduction. Furthermore, we observed the social behavior of large cohorts of workers under experimental and control conditions to test for associations with individual life expectancy. Worker life expectancy was moderately increased by queen removal. Queenless colonies contained a few long-lived workers, and oviposition behavior was associated with a strong reduction in mortality risk, indicating that a reproductive role confers a significant survival advantage. This finding is further substantiated by an association between brood care behavior and worker longevity that depends on the social environment. In contrast, other in-hive activities, such as fanning, trophallaxis, and allogrooming did not consistently affect worker life expectancy. The influence of foraging varied among replicates. An earlier age of transitioning from in-hive tasks to outside foraging was always associated with shorter life spans, in accordance with previous studies. In sum, our studies quantify how individual mortality is affected by particular social roles and colony environments and demonstrate interactions between the two. The exceptional, positive association between reproduction and longevity in honeybees extends to within-caste plasticity, which may be exploited for mechanistic studies.
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