Among bees the state of affairs is again exceptional. Here the female, the so-called queen bee, possesses a capacious sperm-sac, in which the spermatozoa received in copulation remain living for years, and the fertilization of an ovum is effected in the usual way from this sac while the egg from the ovary is passing down the oviduct. The queen bee has the power of releasing some spermatozoa from the receptacle, or of not doing so, and thus of fertilizing the egg, or of not fertilizing it. Since the notable observations of Dzierzon and the investigations of von Siebold and Leuckart which followed them, it has been assumed that only those eggs were fertilized which were laid in the cells destined for rearing females (workers or queens), while those which were to give rise to 'drones' or males remained normally unfertilized. Only in the last decade of the past century did the bee-keepers begin to cast doubt on this so-called 'Dzierzon theory'; various violent and obstinate attacks were made upon it, and these were supported by new and apparently convincing experiments. Dickel, a teacher in Darmstadt, has been particularly strenuous in attempting to overthrow the old theory, by emphasizing the fact that von Siebold's old investigations on bee eggs afforded no convincing proof. Von Siebold made his investigations on eggs freshly taken from the hive, and was never able to find spermatozoa in 'drone eggs' (that is, eggs laid in drone cells and therefore destined to develop into drones), while he was often able to demonstrate the presence of from one to four spermatozoa in 'worker eggs.' But he only examined 'drone eggs' which were already twelve hours old, and in these, as we now know, he would not have found spermatozoa in any case, even if they had been fertilized, because in ova at that stage the development of the embryo has already fully begun, and nothing remains of the spermatozoa. In the bee, according to Buttel-Reepen, the fertilizing spermatozoon is transformed in twenty minutes after it has penetrated into the egg into a minute 'sperm-nucleus' which is almost invisible even in sections, and certainly nothing whatever could be seen of it by the old method of squeezing the fresh ovum. It had therefore to be admitted that Dzierzon's theory rested on an insecure foundation, and I accordingly set two of my students at that time, Dr. Paulcke and Dr. Petrunkewitsch, to examine the eggs of the bee anew with regard to the point in question, using the greatly improved methods at their disposal. These investigations have been carried out in the Freiburg Zoological Institute during the last three years, and have resulted in establishing the absolute correctness of Dzierzon's theory: the 'drone eggs' do remain unfertilized, while the eggs from which females are to develop are fertilized without exception.