Transgenic technologies can be used to test the capability of a given DNA sequence to drive the expression of a reporter gene, such as green fluorescent protein (GFP; Wimmer, 2003). To date, transgenic techniques have been developed for use in several insects [eg the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster; the red flour beetle Tribolium castaneum (Lorenzen et al., 2003); and the mosquito Anopheles gambiae (Grossman et al., 2001)]. The silkmoth, Bombyx mori, has proven to be an excellent model insect (Goldsmith et al., 2005), which evolved from Bombyx mandarina approximately 4100 years ago (Sun et al., 2012). This species can be used in conjunction with established transgenic techniques (Tamura et al., 2000) in a variety of applications (eg Robinson et al., 2004; Sakurai et al., 2011; Daimon et al., 2015). As the cis‐regulatory modularity of a gene can be tested by dissecting it into smaller templates and examining tissue‐specific expressions of corresponding genes (eg Koshikawa et al., 2015), the Bombyx transgenic system exhibits immense potential for functional evaluation, and could be suitable as the first lepidopteran species to be used in such an analysis.