Posted on 08/13/2025 11:36:11 AM PDT by Red Badger
* 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.
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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.
Drones take the longest time to develop.
But what KIND of longer life does the queen have. Queen bees are stuck in the hive, just a big blob of a thing; she can’t fly, can’t move or go anywhere. Where’s the selling point?
Queen can mate with 40 drones.
Lol!
Then the Queen is a ho.....................
Ouch.....body parts break off during mating? Well he had one job......
“A Queen Bee Lives 20 Times Longer Than Her Workers. Scientists Want to Steal Her Secrets For Humanity...Long live the queen.”
great: the secret to living 1-4 years!
Friend ate royal jelly, when he asked me about it, I said don't understand the goal, queens live very short lives compared to humans.
Esther was hiding in plain sight in the palace.
Some while back I’d thought, what if Mordecai had instructed her not to ask any questions. Because that’s the classic ‘tell’ - Jews are the people who ask questions. I didn’t recall that she had asked any questions until she had revealed her identity. So I checked.
Esther 8:6 For how can I endure to see the evil that shall come unto my people? or how can I endure to see the destruction of my kindred?
But as for the drones dying after mating with the queen, it sure looked like that, so why wait...
Esther 7
8 Then the king returned out of the palace garden into the place of the banquet of wine; and Haman was fallen upon the bed whereon Esther was. Then said the king, Will he force the queen also before me in the house? As the word went out of the king’s mouth, they covered Haman’s face.
9 And Harbonah, one of the chamberlains, said before the king, Behold also, the gallows fifty cubits high, which Haman had made for Mordecai, who had spoken good for the king, standeth in the house of Haman. Then the king said, Hang him thereon.
10 So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. Then was the king’s wrath pacified.
It’s supposed to have lots of vitamins and antioxidents.
But then if the workers decide that they don’t like the queen, they’ok kill her and raise another.
Much ado about nothing?
Exactly right.
Worker bees (the females) live on average 15–38 days in the summer. Their jobs progress throughout their short with the last days spent flying out to gather nectar and pollen. That last job is very strenuous and energy consuming, not to mention potentially dangerous, and they literally work themselves to death.
In the winter, the bees left alive at that time never do the foraging job so they live all winter. They will be needed to keep the hive warm so the queen will not die.
The queen does no strenuous work once she completes her maiden flight upon reaching adult stage. She is tended and fed by the workers.
Smash the patriarchy?
This doesn’t end well.
See “Invasion of the Bee Girls” and “Wasp Woman.”
Those are “B” movies......................
Yes, apparently Webster Hubbell is still alive at the age of 77.
If you've ever sat outside a hive and watched the workers brining in the pollen and nectar, you'll see a lot of them coming in with worn out edges on their wings and otherwise looking kind of beaten down. Watching workers like that reminds me of what my boss told me when I was working construction in my 20s and throwing around 4x8 sheets of 3/4 inch plywood: "You can do stuff like that until you're about 35, but if you haven't shifted into a supervisor role by then you'll be completely ruined by 50."
I think that was his justification for just sitting around and telling us grunts to do the garbage jobs, but now that I'm in my 50s I feel all the injuries I racked up on job sites and thought I could just walk off or rub some dirt on it.
I’ve read that kids who eat royal jelly grow taller…
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