Seán G. Brady

TL;DR: This work reconstructs the major evolutionary transitions that produced the five distinct agricultural systems of the fungus-growing ants, the most well studied of the nonhuman agriculturalists, with reference to the first fossil-calibrated, multiple-gene, molecular phylogeny that incorporates the full range of taxonomic diversity within the fungi-growing ant tribe Attini.

TL;DR: The largest ant molecular phylogenetic data set published to date is generated, containing ≈6 kb of DNA sequence from 162 species representing all 20 ant subfamilies and 10 aculeate outgroup families, and casts strong doubt on the existence of a poneroid clade as currently defined.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigated the evolutionary history of a hyperdiverse clade, the ant subfamily Myrmicinae (Hymenoptera: Formicidae), based on analyses of a data matrix comprising 251 species and 11 nuclear gene fragments.

TL;DR: There is unequivocal evidence that ants are the sister group to bees+apoid wasps (Apoidea) and that bees are nested within a paraphyletic Crabronidae, and that taxon choice can fundamentally impact tree topology and clade support in phylogenomic inference.

TL;DR: This work reconstructed a robust phylogeny of bees at the family and subfamily levels using a data set of five genes (4,299 nucleotide sites) plus morphology (109 characters) and suggested an African origin for bees, because the earliest branches of the tree include predominantly African lineages.