Physiological trade-offs in male social insects: Interactions among infection, immunity, fertility, size, and age in honey bee drones

• We tested the trade-off among reproduction and immunity in drones of different ages. • Both virus load and prevalence showed increase with the age of drones. • Virus infection doesn’t reduce reproductive potential of infected drones. • Virus infection may impair immune function and survivability of queens. Female social insects represent a dramatic exception of the evolutionarily conserved physiological trade-off between reproduction and life span, where aging is positively correlated with reproduction. However, whether this facet of life history also pertains to male social insects, remains largely unknown. Male honey bees (drones) die in the act of copulation, placing them under opposing selective pressures. At the individual level, there is inter-male competition for a single successful mating attempt, leading to selective pressure that favor an increase in male fitness. Honey bee drones are haploid individuals and lack the allelic variation in their genome compared to diploid females. We hypothesized that this genetic limitation may result in trade-offs between pathological stress and fitness traits in honey bee males. In our study, we observed differences in size and fertility measures in old and young drones along with stressors of several endemic viruses and the transcriptional immune response. We found that infection does not appear to decrease fertility in old drones, despite evidence for a shift in immune expression away from established mechanisms. Contrary to our expectations, drones additionally do not appear to exhibit a physiological trade-off between size and fertility. These findings demonstrate that drones of different size are likely of different mating quality and that higher quality drones likely favor retaining reproductive output over immune function.