Social stress resistance facilitates exceptional aging patterns in social insects

Aging and stress have an intimate relationship across a wide variety of organisms. Generally, resistance to and avoidance of stress confer increased longevity. Honey bees and other social insects have two main advantages over solitary species to avoid or resist stress: Individuals can directly help each other by resource or information transfer, and they cooperatively control parts of their environment by nest construction. These benefits have been recognized in the context of pathogen and parasite stress as the concept of social immunity, which has been extensively studied. However, in this talk we argue that the concept be more generally defined as social stress resistance, including group-level defenses against potentially all biotic and abiotic stressors. We explore examples and discuss how much individual and colony-level differences in life expectancy can be attributed to social versus individual stress resistance. We reason that social stress resistance may have allowed individual life history optimization with reduced individual-level defenses. Lastly, we speculate on individual and colony-level outcomes of manipulations of social stress resistance mechanisms with implications for understanding social evolution, as well as suggesting practical applications such as improving honey bee health.