Many ants, bees, and wasps use similar or identical chemicals as queen pheromones, even though these taxa diverged >150MYA, and evolved eusociality independently. Here, we use mRNA sequencing to identify queen pheromone-sensitive genes in 4 ant and bee species, and show that pheromones affect many of the same transcriptional modules. Pheromone-sensitive genes tend to be ancient, positively selected, peripheral in transcriptomic networks, hypomethylated, and caste-specific in their expression.
