'The flexible and reversible nature of their reproductive strategies makes facultatively social insects ideal models for understanding the emergence of the simplest forms of reproductive caste (Kronauer & Libbrecht 2018; Shell & Rehan 2018). For example, facultatively social bee taxa have been used to provide evidence for ‘molecular ground plan’ hypotheses (Kapheim et al. 2012, 2020), and to test the long-standing sociogenomic prediction that queen-biased genes should be relatively ancient and conserved compared to worker-biased genes (Jones et al. 2017).'

#Preprint

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.02.518827v1?med=mas