The Regulatory Anatomy of Honeybee Lifespan

Intergenerational transfers may have decoupled physiological and chronological age in a eusocial insect

“…Specifically, the mutation accumulation and antagonistic pleiotropy theories were designed to account for patterns of senescence in a situation where replicating genotypes are under strong negative selection if they have too many life-shorteningor too many longevity-promoting alleles relative to the level of extrinsic mortality. Aging in functionally sterile eusocial individuals that show temporal division of parental functions is, therefore, beyond the immediate explanatory scope of these frameworks (Amdam and Omholt, 2002;Omholt and Amdam, 2004). The fact that nurse bees and diutinus workers, which are exposed to comparable levels of extrinsic mortality risk, are characterized by different rates of senescence is in accordance with this conclusion.…”

“…These resources are not transferred, but appear to be stored in the nurse bees' bodies as storage protein (Amdam and Omholt, 2002). This typically occurs at the end of the favorable season, and an increase in an individual's storage protein content is linked to the transition to the long-lived diutinus stage (Omholt and Amdam, 2004).…”

“…Their performance as collectors of nectar and pollen may go down after as little as 5 days (Tofilski, 2000). Foragers do not have detectable levels of vitellogenin, and may therefore be deprived of storage protein for self-maintenance (Amdam and Omholt, 2002;Amdam et al, 2003). These bees also have few or no functional immune cells (0-1000 μl −1 ) (Rutz et al, 1976;Amdam et al, 2004b).…”

“…By exploiting the regulatory dimension of the disposable soma framework, and by describing honey bee workers as somatic cells in a super-organism (i.e., the social insect society; see Oster and Wilson (1978) for further information on this concept), Amdam and Omholt (2002) were able to address aspects of honey bee worker senescence. However, the use of explanatory modules derived from theory on rates of senescence in cell lines is an analogy in the context of organismal aging within a eusocial group.…”

“…If this level is high, life expectancy in the wild is short, and there is little selection for high levels of somatic maintenance; if the level of extrinsic mortality is low, selection would postpone deleterious gene effects and direct greater investment into building and maintaining a durable soma (reviewed by Kirkwood and Austad, 2000). None of these theories incorporate resources transferred to offspring (Lee, 2003), and none of them were explicitly designed to address aging patterns in alloparental care givers, which may be of particular interest to aging research (Amdam and Omholt, 2002;Omholt and Amdam, 2004).…”