Senescence in the worker honey bee Apis Mellifera

Abstract

Honey bees are social insects that exhibit striking caste-specific differences in longevity. Queen honey bees live on average 1-2 years whereas workers live 2 to 6 weeks in the summer and about 20 weeks in the winter. It is not clear whether queen-worker differences in longevity are due to intrinsic physiological differences in the rate of senescence, to differential exposure to extrinsic factors such as predation and adverse environmental conditions, or both. To determine if the relatively short life span of worker bees involves senescence, we measured age-specific resistance to three different physiological stressors (starvation, thermal, and oxidative stress) while eliminating agerelated differences in foraging activity and minimizing age-related differences in energy expenditure. Despite these manipulations, older worker bees were still significantly less resistant to all three stressors than were younger bees. These results indicate that the regulation of worker bee lifespan involves senescence, in addition to extrinsic factors.

The use of honeybees reared in a thermostatic chamber for aging studies

“…The surviving workers can represent the aging workers. In addition, the results of this study are consistent with previous studies of worker honeybees (Remolina et al 2007;Jemielity and Keller 2007;Hsieh and Hsu 2011) and with that of Drosophila (Grotewiel et al 2005). …”

“…In addition, they live in large colonies, are easily manipulated, and their genome has been sequenced. Therefore, honeybees have been the model system for many aging studies (Remolina et al 2007;Neukirch 1982;Rueppell et al 2007a, b). A variety of honeybee specimens, including spermathecae, muscle, ventriculi, hemolymph plasma, semen, brain, trophocytes, and fat cells, have been used to study oxidative stress (Weirich et al 2002;Seehuus et al 2006a, b;Williams et al 2008;Collins et al 2004;Corona et al 2005) and aging (Hsieh and Hsu 2011).…”

Mortality rates of honey bees in the wild

“…Nevertheless, the few published life tables for honey bees and bumblebees in the field have used chronological age rather than the biologically relevant forager age (Goldblatt and Fell, 1987;Rodd et al, 1980;Sakagami and Fukuda, 1968). Still, chronological age does have some effects on worker honey bees as indicated by the positive correlation between worker age and mortality rate in fed (Rueppell et al, 2007b) and starved bees in the laboratory (Remolina et al, 2007) and by the negative correlation between the age of foraging onset and worker lifespan (Guzman-novoa et al, 1994;Rueppell et al, 2007a).…”

“…The literature on honey bee senescence is somewhat inconclusive. Laboratory data indicate cellular senescence in honey bees (Seehuus et al, 2006) and Remolina et al (2007) documented lower resistance to starvation in older honey bees, which indicates effects of senescence. Rueppell et al (2007b) documented increased mortality rates with age in bees collected from an outdoors hive and maintained in indoor cages until death.…”

Changes in mitochondrial energy utilization in young and old worker honeybees (Apis mellifera)

“…In addition, they live in large colonies, are easily manipulated, and their genome has been sequenced (Remolina et al 2007;Neukirch 1982;Rueppell et al 2007a, b). A variety of honeybee specimens, including spermathecae, muscle, ventriculi, hemolymph plasma, semen, brain, trophocytes, and fat cells, have been used to study oxidative stress and aging (Weirich et al 2002;Seehuus et al 2006a, b;Williams et al 2008;Collins et al 2004;Corona et al 2005;Hsieh and Hsu 2011a, b).…”