Resistance to and avoidance of stress slow aging and confer increased longevity in numerous organisms. Honey bees and other superorganismal 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 can cooperatively control their environment. These benefits have been recognised in the context of pathogen and parasite stress as the concept of social immunity, which has been extensively studied. However, we argue that social immunity is only a special case of a general concept that we define here as social stress protection to include group‐level defences against all biotic and abiotic stressors. We reason that social stress protection may have allowed the evolution of reduced individual‐level defences and individual life‐history optimization, including the exceptional aging plasticity of many social insects. We describe major categories of stress and how a colonial lifestyle may protect social insects, particularly against temporary peaks of extreme stress. We use the honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) to illustrate how patterns of life expectancy may be explained by social stress protection and how modern beekeeping practices can disrupt social stress protection. We conclude that the broad concept of social stress protection requires rigorous empirical testing because it may have implications for our general understanding of social evolution and specifically for improving honey bee health.

中文翻译：

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社会生活导致社会压力保护：解释社会昆虫个体生活史模式的新概念

抵抗和避免压力可以延缓衰老并延长许多生物体的寿命。蜜蜂和其他超个体群居昆虫在避免或抵抗压力方面比独居物种有两个主要优势：个体可以通过资源或信息传递直接互相帮助，并且可以合作控制环境。这些益处已在病原体和寄生虫应激的背景下被认为是社会免疫的概念，并已得到广泛研究。然而，我们认为社会免疫​​只是一般概念的一个特例，我们在这里将其定义为社会压力保护，包括针对所有生物和非生物压力源的群体层面的防御。我们认为，社会压力保护可能导致个体水平防御能力的降低和个体生活史的优化，包括许多社会性昆虫异常的衰老可塑性。我们描述了压力的主要类别，以及殖民地生活方式如何保护群居昆虫，特别是免受暂时的极端压力高峰的影响。我们使用蜜蜂（意大利蜜蜂L.）来说明如何通过社会压力保护来解释预期寿命模式，以及现代养蜂实践如何破坏社会压力保护。我们的结论是，社会压力保护的广泛概念需要严格的实证检验，因为它可能对我们对社会进化的一般理解，特别是对改善蜜蜂健康产生影响。