Honey bee teenagers speed up the ageing process of their elders

Bern, 06. Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies are complex societies, in which work is not distributed by a central power. How tasks are allocated among workers is still poorly understood. A research team from the Swiss Bee Research Center at Agroscope and the Institute of Bee Health at the University of Bern (both Switzerland), discovered that young adults influence this process by promoting older individuals to perform duties outside the hive, which shortens their life expectancy. In honey bee colonies, a single queen is laying eggs from which thousands of worker bees are born. At a young age, workers care for the brood, then build and defend the nest and eventually, towards the end of their lives, leave the safety of the nest to forage for food. This major step in their lives is speeding up ageing because searching the environment for food exposes these foragers to a wide range of stressors, such as - pathogens, predators and adverse weather conditions.