A Queen Bee Lives 20 Times Longer Than Her Workers. Scientists Want to Steal Her Secrets For Humanity.

Yahoo

09-04-2025

Upcoming research funded by the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) will investigate the secrets of longevity in honeybee queens.
Queens eat royal jelly, which has antioxidants and less sugar than the honey tkhat workers eat. This is thought to be part of the reasons queens outlive worker bees.
The gut bacteria of queen bees are thought to be connected to their much longer lifespans as well.
If you ever bought a bottle of vitamins, you've probably seen supplements touting the benefits of royal jelly—a substance worker bees secrete from their glands—on the shelf nearby. It can also be found in anti-aging skincare. And it turns out, there is a reason for the hype.
While it is uncertain whether taking royal jelly capsules or slathering it on your face will slow down the aging process, we do know that queen bees can live up to 20 times longer than workers. And some of that might have to do with royal jelly, which queens and larvae destined for queendom dine on exclusively (0ther factors in their longevity include insulin and their gut microbiomes). Despite having identical DNA to worker bees, queen bees live longer, and humans want in on it, which is the reason all those products exist—and why a new research project is buzzing.
The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding deeper investigations into how queen bees are able to outlive generations of workers. Unlike the honey and bee pollen worker bees eat, the royal jelly reserved for queens is much lower in sugar and rich in vitamins, nutrients, and fatty acids. It also has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties. Gorging on royal jelly isn't going to make you immortal, but the ways in which it affects the biology of queen bees may someday be applied to us.
'If we're able to disentangle, and to reverse engineer, how nature has solved these challenges for them, that can be transformative for pausing aging, human fertility, transport of organs and provide new means of fighting disease,' Yannick Wurm, a newly appointed program director who will join seven others in this endeavor, said in a press release.
This isn't the first time queen bees will be in the spotlight (like most royals), but it will build on previous studies that determined some potential reasons why queens live longer than anyone else in the hive. Their gut health has been found to have a significant role in their extended lifespan. A 2024 study by researchers from the College of Animal Science and Technology at Shandong Agricultural University in Shandong, China, found that microbes in the gut of a queen bee allow her to live long past her workers because they inhibit insulin signaling.
'One of the mechanisms by which queen bees live longer than worker bees would be reducing the degree of oxidative damage by upregulating antioxidant genes' expressions via inhibiting [insulin signaling],' the research team said in that study, published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
The insulin signaling pathway is a metabolic pathway—a series of linked chemical reactions that allows insulin to increase the uptake of glucose, or how much goes into fat and muscle cells. It also regulates blood sugar levels by reducing the amount of glucose synthesized in the liver. Worker bees consume high levels of sugar because of all the honey they eat, and the pancreas releases insulin to help with the uptake of glucose from the bloodstream. Since Queens survive on royal jelly, they're not eating nearly as much sugar.
What the Shandong researchers found was that transplanting gut microbes from a queen into workers without gut microbes extended workers' lives, most likely because the queen's gut bacteria regulates food intake. Insulin signaling and antioxidant pathways were also found to be related. Royal jelly contains antioxidants, which reduce oxidative stress, or cell damage from free radicals—highly unstable and reactive oxygen molecules that can break down parts of DNA, potentially causing cancer and other diseases.
In another 2024 study, published in Scientific Reports, a different team of researchers observed honeybee queens and saw that older queens had larger gut microbes, which suggested that there was a relationship between their gut microbiome and immune health.
Whether or not royal jelly (and other aspects of being a queen bee) can extend our own lives remains a mystery for now. But with the upcoming ARIA project, the queen might finally give up some of her secrets.
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