Frédéric Eggers de Villepin

history of the discoveries about the sexuality of the honey bee

In the following pages, the party has been taken to build a framework based on some of the great names in the history of the development of knowledge on our subject, and to include less illustrious or lesser-known contributors. In doing so, we cannot rule out the possibility that knowledge may have been developed at different times and in different places by keen observers, scholars or simple practitioners, but that we are not aware of it, that they have not written or that we have not read them. And if the pages that follow mention "discoveries", it is important to understand that, as Fran ois Huber, the Swiss naturalist whom we will meet frequently in this text, says: "practice has always preceded theory," and that those who think never do so ex nihilo. 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." Fr d ric Eggers de Villepin is an amateur beekeeper in Paris, France, and formerGeneral Secretary and librarian of the Soci t Centrale d'Apiculture, France's oldest beekeeping organization.