The life history of honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) workers is sharply divided into an early phase of in hive activities and the reminder of life spent foraging outside the hive. Four quantitative trait loci (QTL) that affect the timing of the transition from hive bee to forager (age of first foraging: aff) were characterized in a previous study. Here, we report on effects of genetic markers for these QTL on worker longevity. Bees from two separate crosses were collected at emergence, color-marked, and introduced to a common hive environment, while a small subset was directly frozen for subsequent genetic analysis. The color-marked cohort was aged until less then ten percent of the original bees survived. The oldest survivors were frozen and genotyped for the QTL markers. Significant shifts in allele frequency between the young and the old group indicate genetic effects of the aff regions on post-hatching survival.