In mankind's eternal quest to live longer, this interesting paper explores the mechanisms of aging in honeybees. Queen bees live for years, while workers live for weeks (unless it's winter when they live for months.) Ingenious experiments tease out whether workers live shorter lives because of their dangerous lives outside the hive - exposed to parasites* or drowning risk - or their immune and oxygen-radical scavenging systems diminish - probably the latter. Do the queens have a different hormone profile that promotes longevity, and is that a result of diet? The paper ends with a (likely unknowable) chicken-or-the-egg question - did queens evolve longer lives because of honeybees' cooperative social structure that expends huge energies on maintaining the queen, or did the social structure evolve because queens were endowed with longevity?
*the "sugar-shake" test (dumping powdered sugar on bees) releases mites by sticking to their feet, allowing them to be counted.
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