Putting together this history of the discoveries about the sexuality of the honey bee gives us the opportunity to delve into a past where intuitions, advances, sometimes lasting controversies, twists and turns, misunderstandings, admiration, humility or emboldened presumption, friendly dialogues or discourteous polemics follow one another. In so doing, we will follow the slow and difficult work of elucidating reality about a few selected questions concerning what the Genevan naturalist Charles Bonnet called “the great & murky matter of the generation of living beings."

Frédéric Eggers de Villepin is an amateur beekeeper in Paris, France, and former General Secretary and librarian of the Société Centrale d’Apiculture, France’s oldest beekeeping organization.