Abstract
Social evolution in honey bees and other social insects has led to unique selection pressures that influence behavior and life history. Honey bees have evolved a pronounced division of labor among different colony members that is making colonies more productive. At the individual level, the different behavioral roles are accompanied by different rates of aging. The intimate relation between behavior and aging in honey bees is due to a combination of external mortality risks and physiological processes. Senescence is task-related and only loosely connected to chronological age because social conditions can precipitate social behavior and hence senescence processes at variable ages. This task-dependency can explain why honey bee workers even can experience negative senescence. Colony-level selection has presumably influenced the pattern of division of labor to optimize individual life histories by correlating the intrinsic residual survival value with external mortality risk. The resulting feedback loops suggest the existence of further evolutionary and mechanistic connections between aging and behavior in honey bees that warrant further exploration.
Published Version
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